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Facebook Rolls out Dashboard to Check Time Spent on the App

Few days after Instagram rolled out a feature that lets you know how long you spend on the application, parent company, Facebook has rolled out “Your Time on Facebook tool that counts how many minutes you spend on the app. According to the company, it is designed to help users manage their social networking time as the dashboard reveals how many minutes you have spent on the Facebook app on that device each day for the past week and on the average.
 
The feature which you can access by going to Facebook’s more Tab–>Settings & Privacy–> Your Time on Facebook allows you to set a daily limit and receive a reminder to stop after that many minutes each day, plus access shortcuts to the notification, News Feed and Friend Request Settings. 
 
Photo Credits: Techcrunch
Although Facebook started talking about the rollout in June, execution of the feature had taken quite a while to sort out bugs. According to spokespeople from the company “We typically rollout features slowly so we can catch bugs early and resolve them quickly. We slowed the rollout of the tools after launch so our teams could fix a few bugs before we expanded globally…the tools will continue rolling out over the next few weeks”.
“The well-being research that we’ve done . . . suggests that when people use the Internet for interacting with people and building relationships, that is correlated with all the positive measures of well-being that you’d expect — like longer-term health and happiness, feeling more connected and less lonely – whereas just passively consuming content is not necessarily positive on those dimensions” –  Mark Zuckerberg on the Q1 2018 earnings call
 
However, you can’t tell active and passive app usage from the dashboard. There is also no way to see a breakdown of how long you spend on the Newsfeed, watching stories or exploring photos on profiles versus creating posts or comments, messaging and interacting in groups. A good data in this direction could help users get a clearer view of where they are spending or wasting hours and what they could do to make their time on Facebook healthier.
 
Yet you can’t tell active and passive Facebooking apart from the dashboard. There’s no way to see a breakdown of how long you spend browsing the News Feed, watching Stories, or exploring photos on profiles versus creating posts or comments, messaging, or interacting in Groups. That segmentation would give users a much clearer view of where they’re spending or wasting hours, and what they could do to make their usage healthier
 
 

Opeyemi Olugbemiro

Your tech story amazes me. When you think of a tech innovation that makes life better, you've caught my attention. #SerialOptimist Contact: opeyemi@zumalo.com