• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, December 10, 2015

As part of a broader effort to reach all consumers regardless of their location or socioeconomic status, Facebook is trying to make News Feed more accessible at slower mobile Web speeds.

In the past, if users were on a poor Web connection or had no connection, they would have to wait for stories to load after opening News Feed.

Now, Facebook will look at all the previously downloaded and yet-to-be-viewed stories on a user’s phone, and rank them based on relevance. The social giant will factor in whether the images for the story are available or not.

“This way, we can immediately display relevant stories you haven't seen yet, instead of showing a spinner while you wait for new stories,” Facebook engineers Chris Marra and Alex Sourov explain in a new blog post. “When we receive new stories from the server when you're back online, we load and rank those stories normally.”

Facebook’s engineering team is also testing improvements to keep stories up to date throughout the day by periodically retrieving new stories when users do have a good connection.

Users can also now comment on stories they see when they are offline. The ability to like and share posts when one is offline has been available for some time.

Positioned as a public good, Facebook wants to turn all of humanity into regular users of the social network.   

To that end, it recently rolled out “Lite” -- a less data-demanding version of its current Android mobile app. The new app was designed to work well across all network conditions.

Lite features Facebook’s core services, such as News Feed, status updates, photos, and notifications. Because it’s less than 1MB, Facebook also promises that Lite is fast to install and quick to load.

Facebook also launched Internet.org in 2013, which, along with its flagship platform, gives users access to news, job search services, health and local government information, among other offerings.