What on Earth is that Rocket Icon on Facebook For?

If you've opened up Facebook on your smartphone recently, you may have noticed that there's a new icon at the top of the app; in the upper left hand corner.

Go ahead, I'll give you a second to look and once you see it, you'll notice that it's a rocket ship. My boyfriend, Jason, first pointed it out to me on Sunday morning and quickly asked, "what is this rocket ship thing on Facebook?"  He was even more confused when he clicked on it and exclaimed, "what is Whitney Martin doing in my news feed?" They aren't friends so he was so confused.

At that point my interest was piqued and I started to do some investigating. Here's what I found; according to "Help Community" on Facebook it's the "Start Exploring" section:

The "Start Exploring" section is a new feed of posts about topics that may interest you.

A thread in Reddit described it as a way to divide your news feed into your main news feed and your pages feed. So, the pages that you "like" will be in one feed and your "friends" will be in the other.

Many of the things you'll see when you click on the rocket ship will also be top trending topics and videos; and it may even be from pages you didn't even like but it might be something that interests you based on previews clicks and views.

If this was Facebook, this would be where I'd ask, "was this information helpful?"

Catch Mandy James on “The Steve Shannon Show with Mandy James” on 97 ZOK from 5:30 a.m. to 10 a.m. Follow her on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.