Facebook Deploys Weather App (Quietly)

It turns out that the world’s most popular social media platform has decided to start rolling out (albeit quietly) a full weather forecast feature within its main mobile app and its desktop site. This new addition to Facebook can be accessed easily from News Feed or the app’s More menu, that part that takes you to Friends, Events, Groups, and Pages, among many others. Users can get a full week’s forecast within the weather section, with weather information courtesy of Weather.com. According to Facebook, the new feature is actually an updated version of its weather greetings. This latest addition to the app is now being deployed this week to about 95 percent of all users around the world.

Facebook is no stranger to exploring ways in which it can provide weather updates to its users. Some may remember that several years back, the company had added forecasts to events and public places. Then in April of last year, the social media giant was reported testing weather updates in its News Feed for users based in the United Kingdom. 

Also in 2016, Facebook had deployed aforementioned weather greetings, which consisted of concise weather updates that were displayed at the top of the News Feed in the morning. As stated earlier, the new weather forecast feature is an expansion of that earlier functionality. But wait -- what if users miss the weather greeting? No worries -- users can still get updates from the weather section in Facebook’s app, where it appears as an added option in the menu. On top of that, Facebook will now give its users the option of setting notifications for getting weather updates. The social media giant has said that Notifications and the more specific weather greetings are being deployed for testing now, and before the start of March, these features should be rolled out to all users across the globe.

Users will be delighted to know that the weather section of the Facebook mobile app will default to their current location. However, if users want to add other locations, they can do so by tapping the Settings wheel located in the top right section. Oh, users can also set temperature information to appear either in Celsius or Fahrenheit values. The cool thing about the weather updates is that they are presented in a simple manner -- forecasts are expressed as sunny, partly cloudy, etc., plus the highs and lows, and the daily forecast can be displayed by the hour.