November 01, 2015
For many who enjoy the luxuries of life in a technologically advanced country, a crawling URL bar ranks high among the most frustrating moments of any given day. When that highlight reel or celebrity interview will not load, you can feel the magnitude Bill O'Reilly tantrum coming and you have to gently set your phone aside.
It's even worse if it's work-related, and that's why some forward-thinking employees at Facebook are opting into a new program, "2G Tuesdays," that will require them to experience the slow Internet that the majority of people in some developing countries deal with on a daily basis.
According to BusinessInsider, Facebook's engineering team designed the program to help employees bridge the "empathy gap" between those around the world just beginning to get online with 2G networks. That means web pages taking up to two minutes to load.
For one hour every Tuesday, participating Facebook employees will work using 2G as they test ways to streamline and optimize the News Feed for emerging markets. When connection speeds are low, feeds will prioritize status updates over photos or videos, for example.
The move is part of CEO Mark Zuckerberg's larger goal to make Internet access available for free worldwide, an initiative he's taken up with the Internet.org project.
As for Facebook employees, they'll get to experience firsthand how their game-changing app is catching on in countries like India, which is now the company's second-largest market behind the United States, with 130 million users logging on.
