Andre Yoskowitz
28 Oct 2015 19:45
Facebook has announced this week the start of "2G Tuesdays," an initiative that will slow down employee's Internet speed so they can "close the empathy gap" between the heart of the tech world and emerging markets like India and parts of Africa.
2G speeds are incredibly slow but are still used in many parts of the world. Compared to an LTE connection, loading a simple page or app like Facebook could take what feels like an eternity.
Now, the slow speeds will not be mandatory, but every Tuesday when employees log in to the Facebook app, there will be a prompt in their News Feed to try out the connection for an hour.
"For that next hour, their experience on Facebook will be very much like the experience that millions of people around the world have on Facebook on a 2G connection," engineering director Tom Alison says. "They're going to see the places that we need to improve our product, but they're also going to see the places where we have made a lot of progress."
Facebook continues to optimize the app, as well, to perform better on slower connections.
Source:
BI