After Google and Twitter got caught in the Olympics fever and exhibited their exuberance by launching various updates to help you keep track of events and players, Facebook wasn’t going to be the one to be left behind.
The social networking giant has hence launched a slew of similar features as well. Users on the social networking giant will be able to show their support for their favorite teams while also getting all the news they could want from a personalized section on the feed.
First off, the platform is introducing custom Profile Frames for the Rio Olympics. They have been in vogue recently and we saw people changing them for various reasons, such as to exhibit support for a particular team or country. For the Olympics, Facebook will let you frame your picture with the Rio 2016 logo and the flag of your country.
Much more interestingly, Facebook’s acquisition of photo and video filter app MSQRD will also contribute towards letting users make the most of Olympics. The company is rolling out country flag masks which you can overlay on your photos or videos starting from today. The app will also let you live broadcast the process so that people can watch you right before and after putting on the mask.
There is also a personalized section on your news feed that you may have come across on opening Facebook. The section doesn’t really look like much and is merely an Olympic logo and a message that reads. Click on the section and Facebook will take you to page with loads of Olympic content that will include Olympics-related searches, conversations, events, live videos from Rio and a lot more. The content is personalized for you, so there is a strong likelihood of you chancing upon something you like.
However, if you continue disregarding the message, it will eventually give up on you and disappear. So if you are actually interested in the games, do make sure that you click on the message at least once and perhaps bookmark the link, because for some strange reason Facebook makes this type of content extremely hard to find. Perhaps it assumes that since you are not clicking on the message, you are probably uninterested and then tries to keep you from running into the link.
Indeed, something similar happened with the Sports stadium section, Facebook launched last year to provide sports fans with a separate destination to really go all out on games. You could receive play by play coverage of games, read analysis and comments by experts, friends and family and so on. However, the page is difficult to find as well. This really gives Twitter a slight edge, considering that everything there is front and center.