Facebook’s Status Box Gets More Personal, Asks You “What’s Going On?” By Name

Here’s something quite interesting coming from Facebook on a day when it launched its SnapChat competitor, “Poke.” It seems like the company is testing out a design that is a bit more…personal.

We’re familiar with the prompts within the status box when we log into Facebook and sit on our news feed. Today, I noticed something different. It asked me, by name, what was going on. We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment, but these are the types of design and user experience tests that we see in the wild all of the time.

This might be an interesting technique to get people to share more. Seeing it was like getting a call from someone and them saying “Hi, Drew” rather than “May I speak to Mr. Olanoff?” That slight difference might increase the number of status messages that people share on a daily basis.

At least, that’s what Facebook is hoping, I’m sure. Either way, it’s an interesting experiment, and one that makes Facebook look a little more human, which is something that it’s been lacking of late. Sure, it’s a social network, but when your friends’ content is surrounded by ads all of the time, you tend to lose that personal touch.

Having said that, the more items that are shared, the more you’ll come back to the site and to more opportunities for Facebook ads.

Have you seen this on Facebook?

Update: A Facebook spokesperson told us: “This is something we’re testing … We’re testing different variations to see how people like them.”

[Photo credit: Flickr]