Meta Introduces Friends Tab To Revive Original Facebook Experience

Meta announced yesterday the introduction of a new Facebook Friends tab designed to help users connect with real friends and revisit the “OG” Facebook experiences.

According to the official announcement, the tab allows users to see only friends’ content in the feed. The new feature will begin to roll out in the United States and Canada today

“We want to make it easier for people to find their friends’ content on Facebook,” states the document. “Formerly a place to view friend requests and People You May Know, the Friends tab will now show your friends’ stories, reels, posts, birthdays, and friend requests.”

Facebook users will be able to pin the new Friends tab in the app settings to customize the Home feed.

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, shared a post on Facebook showing how the new feature looks and what users will see with the new experience, while also comparing it to an older Facebook version from 2008 on a desktop. “The new Friends tab is a throwback to OG Facebook when you only saw friends’ status updates,” wrote  Zuckerberg in the post.

According to the New York Times, Zuckerberg and his Facebook team have been working on strategies since 2024 to rebrand the platform for the current trends and future experiences.

“This idea of having a central place of what’s going on with your friends, that was like the magic of the early days of social media,” said Tom Alison, Head of the Facebook app at Meta, in an interview with the New York Times. “We’re making sure that there’s still a place for this stuff on Facebook. It is something that shouldn’t get lost in the modern social media mix.”

The social media platform has been going through multiple updates this year. In January, Meta announced its plan to connect all of its platforms, now including WhatsApp, in its Accounts Center to make it easier for users to share one post across multiple platforms.