When people hear the word “Facebook,” it has become analogous to the “face of social media.” It thrives on being on the top as technology evolves, and other competing social networks emerge. That is why the social network introduces new features in just a matter of months, if not years, to keep up with its users’ needs and to encourage more potential users.
From the very beginning, Facebook has improved its social network features non-stop. Recently, the social media giant has introduced some changes and updates to its feature “On This Day” memories.
Facebook always surprises its users with feature upgrades.
And this results in notifying users and expands the feature to “milestones.” It has improved the function so that it does not only resurface posts from the same date one year or more years ago.
Facebook expands the popularity of its two-year-old “On This Day” sharing prompt. It has an addition of the new feature that allows users to revisit their memories. Likewise, this allows them to celebrate milestones in connection to their friendships on this social network. While “On This Day” feature can give users a look back in time starting with the same date as last year’s memories, a couple of new options will focus on their more recent memories instead.
Facebook will start to bundle its users’ past posts into a seasonal, or monthly sharing prompts. Users, for example, might see stories recapped like their February memories or their summer memories. This modified function is to recapitulate the users’ posts and photos to highlight what has happened in the past month. They can share these on their profile if they want to.
So, why does Facebook do this?
Well, it is because the social network wants to encourage its users to be more active and to regularly share photos or posts on their timelines. It also makes some efforts to remind users how fun it is to use Facebook before all arguments and debates over such fake news or some baby pics. Moreover, with the milestone posts, users will be shown how many friends they have added and how many likes they have gathered.
The social network company has stated that it plans to give more metrics like this and make them shareable on users’ timelines in the future. Therefore, users can interpret this as they want to for their own New Feeds.
Just like “On This Day,” these new sharing prompts are private to users unless they wish to post them on their Facebook profile. They also appear on the users’ News Feed where they can find the collection of photos the social network has picked for them, together with the “Share” button at the bottom.
Little do you know, the world’s largest social network has also struggled with consumer adoption when the recap feature arrived. Facebook began to show grayed-out photos of friends’ photos earlier in 2017 in “Stories” in an attempt to expand usage.
What can the netizens expect from this tweak?
Facebook is convinced that “Stories” is just a new sharing format every social media will offer in time. Nonetheless, a lot of people think of Facebook as a lasting record of their life events. Thanks to the social network’s capability to surface users’ old memories, scroll back or search through timelines to find meaningful personal moments such as the date the user has married, started a new job, moved to a new home, and so forth.
That is why for Facebook a recap feature makes more sense, unlike with the recency related with “Stories.” It is more fitting for the social network to encourage users from day one to record what matters most in their lives and not what is disposable.
Aside from these, users receive “celebratory” notifications when they “make a notable number of friends on Facebook, and when your friends have liked your posts.” Although these are not shareable yet, they will be soon, so it’s another interesting feature to watch out for.
Facebook product manager, Oren Hod, has revealed that they plan to launch more messages like this in a few months.
The feature might give a negative impact.
“On This Day” has been tagged as one of Facebook’s most divisive features, with some users enjoying its daily reminders while others find it annoying. Nonetheless, constant reminders for things that users posted recently, including meaningless notifications about “milestones” they do not care about, could get extremely annoying.
Facebook has also rolled out an advantageous functionality as part of the update, which quickly lets users know they do not want to be reminded of such a memory.
Hod has said that they received people’s inputs over the last couple of years. And they have essentially worked to improve “On This Day” feature like making controls and preferences easier to access. Also, he has added that there are some memories, which may sometimes spark negative feelings to users that they want to avoid.
Some memories are just too painful to recall.
Hence, it is true that people do have some memories that are not welcome and are painful to remember. Because of this, the social network has invested a lot in making ways to filter content that can select images they believe can be most pertinent and enjoyable to users.
To cite an example, a certain Facebook user once shared his bad experience where the feature showed him a photo of his best friend who had unfortunately committed suicide. According to him, since this recall was unexpected, it has just dredged up old memories and feelings he already buried years ago.
Facebook has stated that the social media giant uses a particular algorithm to take out potentially painful or nostalgic memories through monitoring the number of angry or sad reactions.
How to filter ‘On This Day’ memories?
“On This Day” memories feature is the one that shows some memories to look back on from a particular date on their timeline — in their Facebook history.
However, users can go to the “On This Day” Preferences where they can “filter” the people and/or dates that they would rather “not be reminded of” in this memories feature. And when the users have finally specified the individuals and/or the dates, they will no longer be told of any of these even in future years.
Thus, Memories include the posts, pictures and their friends’ posts wherein they are tagged in, as well as major life events and the date they became friends with other users on this social network.
To see your Facebook memories, one can follow these two easy steps:
- Click Apps in the left column.
- Click “On This Day.”
The users also may turn on the notifications of this memories feature to see when they have memories to look back on.
Meanwhile, when it comes to blocking out the particular people and/or dates, users can go to the “On This Day” Preferences. Then click ‘Notifications’ and select ‘All Memories.’ More so, users can choose ‘Highlights’ so that they can only see memories from their top friends.
