Facebook has a plan to give its employees a taste of what people with slow internet connections experience. The company is working to expand into areas with no broadband access, and it seems to think that its workforce should know just what they are dealing with.
The opt-in initiative is called 2G Tuesdays. Employees who join the programme will have their internet speed throttled to 2G speeds for an hour. This provides the people developing the world’s most used social networking site understand the limitations of many of their users, and develop a better product.
It is a relatively creative move, considering that there is often a disconnect between the people building websites and the target audience. Especially when over a billion of that audience lives in developing nations with slow or unstable internet connections. Whether this will eventually translate into a more product optimised for slow connections is entirely unknown, but at least Facebook is trying something new.
Facebook has been tweaking its mobile apps to better work with slow data connections, partially by revamping its Android app; but also by launching a stripped down version of the app for developing countries. Facebook has also been leading an initiative to bring the internet to remote places in the world through Internet.org.
[Source: Techcrunch]
