Facebook Launches New Weather Forecast Section in Mobile App

Facebook has come up with another way to convince users to stay within the social networking app, recently introducing a complete weather forecast section that uses GPS location to present a detailed 24-hour and 5-day forecast, powered by Weather.com (via TechCrunch). The feature is an expansion of the previous "weather greetings" that appeared on the Facebook mobile app beginning about a year ago, which include succinct time-of-day greetings along with a stock forecast message.

Now, users can tap on those greetings and jump into a full forecast of their area. Although the greetings link users to the forecast section, sometimes the prompts aren't always there when the app is opened. To manually find the forecast: open Facebook > tap the hamburger "More" tab on the bottom right of the app > tap "See More" > scroll down and tap "Weather."

The heading of the section includes doodles that change depending on the weather, alongside the current temperature, high and low estimates for the day, and a one-to-three sentence summation of the present forecast. Under that, users can scroll through the next 24 hours, and look ahead to the next 5 days.

If more information is required, the very bottom of Facebook's forecast section has a "see more weather info" button that launches Weather.com. To see the weather for another location, the gear icon on the top right of the screen includes a search field to find more cities.

According to Facebook, the goal of adding weather forecasts was to "connect people to the things they care about most."

“We are doing this because our goal is to develop products that connect people to the things they care about most and create moments of joy in people’s day, like simply telling you that it’s going to rain later,” a spokesperson said.

Weather forecasts are now available to around 95 percent of Facebook users globally, on both mobile and desktop. The company is also testing a feature that lets users turn on push notifications in regards to weather forecasts, which should be available widely by the end of the month. Facebook is available to download for free on the iOS App Store. [Direct Link]