If you’re one of the billion or so people using Facebook to connect with friends and family, you now can use the social networking site to automatically celebrate your important memories.
On This Day, a tool launched by Facebook on Tuesday, takes anything from birthdays to wedding anniversaries logged on the site and notifies you of the special moments on a dedicated page on the site, through your News Feed or via mobile app. Facebook has beentesting the feature for several years, but this is its official debut after the company took in user feedback to develop the current iteration of the feature.
Currently, there’s no way to completely opt out of the feature on your News Feed, but Facebook has confirmed that an algorithm will work to filter out potentially unpleasant memories, such as posts from people you’ve broken up with and memorialized pages. This will come as welcome news to users who remember some of the issues related to Facebook’s Year In Review feature.
And these On This Day reminders aren’t just for weddings and special events, they also extend to posts you’ve been tagged in. So that all-nighter from last year, complete with photos of you dancing on the streets of Barcelona? Yep, there’s the potential that you’ll get to relive that night over and over, each year. If it shows up in your News Feed, you can delete it, but we can’t help but think that some old event may eventually pop up that you’d rather not relive.
Aside from the News Feed, if you’d rather keep your own On This Day entry notifications to a minimum, you can simply turn notifications off and opt to only view days presented on your private On This Day page (facebook.com/onthisday), where you can delete any events or dates you’d rather not see again.
Users unable to see the feature today should just give it a little more time as the company gradually distributes the feature to its mobile and desktop users globally in the coming days.
