Facebook is always trying out new products and features that may or may not be used by the general public later on. This time, the company seems to be gearing up to test a “red envelope” feature to make it easier for users to send cash gifts to others on the social network and a “breaking news” tag that publishers can attach to breaking events they want to draw attention to. The Next Web’s Matt Navara spotted these features that the company doesn’t seem to be officially testing just yet.
The red envelope feature seems to be a nod to the Chinese tradition where money is given as gifts in red envelopes for special occasions like Chinese New Year. This might mean Facebook is gearing up to bring peer-to-peer payments to its main app. The Facebook Messenger app is already offering payments. This would make sense as Facebook’s new Marketplace section encourages people to sell goods on there as they would on, say, Craigslist and having them facilitate payment within the app would make it convenient. However, Facebook wouldn’t confirm or deny this feature.
Facebook did confirm with Recode that a breaking news tag is coming to a “future test” but refused to say anything else. We don’t know exactly how this will impact publishers but perhaps it might push stories higher to their subscribers’ and other users’ feeds, give them a different more visually arresting look, or even generate some kind of notification for users.