If you can't beat it, copy it

Meta announced major changes to the Facebook app on Thursday, altering the platform to deliver a more TikTok-like experience.

📱 What’s changing… The News Feed will be renamed “Home,” part of the company’s larger transition away from news. It'll now show a never-ending stream of mostly video public posts from creators, suggested algorithmically based on what the platform thinks a user is most likely to enjoy and engage with.

• The app is also introducing a new tab called “Feeds,” which serves up ​​chronologically ordered posts from friends, groups, and Pages that users follow (aka the OG Instagram). Posts from these users will also appear in the Home screen.

📸 The big picture: Facebook actually lost daily users for the first time ever in the last quarter of 2021. And while it returned to the black in the first quarter of this year, it’s now growing slower than ever.

With this move, FB is shifting towards algorithm-based content in an attempt to become less of a social networking site, and more of a content and product recommendation engine relying on algorithms and machine learning to serve a user content they may be interested in – a popular industry trend called “discovery.”

• Snap and Twitter have also invested heavily in the area, according to The New York Times.

+Original, schmidginal: Meta isn’t the only big tech firm to recently… adapt a competitor’s style. Amazon’s Prime Video is rolling out a Netflix-esque update over the next couple of weeks, while Microsoft on Tuesday debuted a new Teams social media platform that looks nearly identical to the classic FB.