14 DAY TRIAL // The biggest social network in the world, Facebook, has announced that it will be removing the 'Regional Networks' feature in the next few weeks. The company believes that, because of the ever increasing number of users, it has outgrown any benefit it may have had from the feature and that it became obsolete. The social network site claims that this wasn't a very popular feature among users and that it will implement ways so that the it won't be missed.
“When we added regional networks to the site back in 2005, they provided a useful way for people to find and connect with the people around them. We've grown substantially since then, and today these networks too often represent large geographical areas – sometimes entire countries – that no longer accurately reflect people's real-world connections,” Paul McDonald wrote on Facebook's official blog.
Facebook will remove all the instances related to the feature in steps to give users time to find out about the change and accommodate to it. The filter for regional networks was already removed from the News Feed, and the company says a small number of people were using the filters anyway, and filters for schools, workplaces and Friend List were much more popular and a better way of finding the information you wanted.
In the near future Facebook will be removing regional networks from groups or events too. The ones that only now allow users from a certain region to enter will be available to everyone but the administrators of those groups or events will be informed of the change. Other features will follow after that.
However the company insists that information regarding the region users live in will not be removed. Users will be able to set their city or country in their profiles and that information will be available in search results. “For the 50 percent or so of people who have joined regional networks, we'll eventually be moving information about those networks to your profile so that you can still tell people where you live,” McDonald wrote.