Your Facebook timeline is about to get a lot easier to navigate thanks to 3D Touch

By Robert Nazarian January 22, 2016

facebook ios app 3d touch news — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Facebook announced today that you will soon be able to use 3D Touch in your timeline on the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus. Users will be able to “peek” at links, profiles, and more by lightly pressing on them. By peeking, a preview of the information will be revealed within a popup so that you don’t have to navigate away from your spot. If you find the information to be useful and want to open it, just press a littler harder to “pop” into it.

This is known as peek and pop, and was introduced as part of 3D Touch on the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus last September. The display on both of those phones has pressure-sensing capabilities allowing the phones to detect how hard you are pressing.

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Apple added these features to its own apps at that time, but other developers are finally starting to see the merits of this new interaction. Apps like Instagram, Flickr, and Dropbox have added 3D-Touch capabilities.

The current Facebook app already has 3D-Touch controls, but they are limited to the app icon from the main home screen. You can hard press on the icon to open a popup that lets you choose what action you want to take. For example, you can choose Take Photo/Video, Upload Photo/Video, or Write Post. This is a lot quicker than tapping the icon to open the app, followed by finding the desired function.

By adding peek and pop to the timeline, users should find navigating to be more efficient.

Facebook is currently testing this new feature with a “small group,” and a wider roll-out is expected in the coming months. Facebook says that you will be able peek and pop Facebook Pages, Facebook Groups, Facebook Events, photos, cover photos, profile pictures, Web links, and profiles.

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Robert Nazarian

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Robert Nazarian became a technology enthusiast when his parents bought him a Radio Shack TRS-80 Color. Now his biggest…

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