Facebook Announces New Feature That Aggregates Old Memories

Facebook launched a new feature on Monday called Memories, where users can look back at all their old posts and photos in a single location.

According to Oren Hod, a product manager at the company who announced the new feature on Facebook’s blog, over 90 million people a day use the social network’s “On This Day” feature, which shows users what they were doing on that same date, say, a year ago. This inspired the company to put further emphasis on aggregating “memories” on the platform.

Users’ Memories pages include On This Day posts, Friends Made On This Day posts (which, in addition to showing friends users connected with on that day, may also show video collages featuring those friends), and Memories You May Have Missed (a log of the past week’s “memories”). Recaps of Memories consist of “seasonal or monthly recaps” in the form of messages and short videos.

Of course, there are certain posts users may not want to be reminded of, like those featuring past romantic partners. Currently, Facebook lets users set filters for the On This Day feature, one of which allows them to list the names of people they don’t want to see pop back up from old posts. Presumably, those same filters could extend to Memories’ other features.

As of now, Hod didn’t provide specific information on how users could help tailor their personal Memories pages. “We try to listen to feedback and design these features so that they’re thoughtful and offer people the right controls that are easy to access,” he wrote. “We work hard to ensure that we treat the content as part of each individual’s personal experience, and are thankful for the input people have shared with us over the past three years.”

Hod also cited research conducted by a Facebook user experience researcher, Artie Konrad. In a Medium post from August 2017, Konrad described how he and his team developed On This Day, which involved polling a group of Facebook users about their “fun, interesting, and important life moments” and determining how to avoid showing users’ “negative memories.” Perhaps more focus groups are convening as we speak.

So far, my Memories page consists solely of an On This Day post from seven years ago in which a friend apologizes for not calling me back. Users can find their Memories pages at facebook.com/memories or through notifications and News Feed messages on the social platform.