Facebook Testing New Access Points for Viral Communication Channels

1. Facebook is returning to a “Top News” stream as the default home page feed, pushing the real-time stream to a secondary tab.
2. Groups are now getting partial News Feed presence.

Now, some users are seeing additional UI tests Facebook is running in the site’s header. In the tests, the header contains new icons for users to access Facebook’s core communication channels: notifications, requests, and messages.

The number of unread notifications, requests, or messages appears in a red bubble in the header, just as notifications do now in the site’s application bar at the bottom of the screen.