Facebook New Design Tweak Draws A Lot From Path

This article originally appeared on 60 Second Social.

You can call it coincidence, inspiration or just down right copying. Either way, if you build something for either a large or a small community which benefits Facebook’s community then you can bet your ass that Facebook is coming after it. 

Twitter’s follow button which became the subscribe button on Facebook, verified profiles on Twitter which became verified accounts on Facebook and then after failing to acquire Snapchat Facebook decided to create their own app, Slingshot. It has never really taken off.

Facebook tends to like design ideas from on other app in particular, Path. In fact, Techcrunch as even reported that a Facebook employee has openly said on stage that, “Facebook is trying to copy Path.” Facebook has somewhat of a Path related history in terms of getting inspiration.

For instance, just one of a few examples points to last year when Path began letting users instant message with businesses instead of just calling them. A few months ago Facebook announced a similar “Businesses On Messenger” feature.

However at the moment, the latest inspiration that they are getting from Path is around the design of the app. Path has a really neat little feature when you tap on the post icon in the navigation bar on the bottom of the app. When you tap that button you get a set of flyout button options to select from taking a photo, checking in, writing a post and so on.

Its an elegant solution to reducing clutter when you want to have multiple options to choose from, it is essentially dividing a button into several different subsections which is pretty neat. Of course it is so neat that Facebook wants it and is currently testing their own version of the exact same thing.

Facebook has confirmed to several different sources that this design is being tested and at the moment it is only available to a small number of users and of course it may never actually make it out to the general public. A flyout menu on Facebook could get people sharing a wider variety of content, it puts buttons to share different content in a more prominent place.

Facebook wants to keep as much of your content as possible on their social network, the only thing I really put on Facebook these days are links. A flyout menu could encourage people to share more variety when it comes to posting.

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About The Author

Mark is the founder of 60 Second Social media where he provides social media news and digital marketing analysis. He has an Advanced Diploma in Psychology and a Diploma in Digital Marketing And Social Media. You can follow him on Twitter here. You can also follow 60 Second Social on Twitter here. Or you can drop Mark an email at, daltomark@me.com