Who says you can't have your cake and eat it too? If you're one of Facebook's 1.71 billion users, you can now enjoy all the happiness (and awkwardness) your birthday brings to your online community all thanks to the social media network's new feature: the birthday recap video.
All the best birthday greetings — and by "best" we're predicting the ones that gain the most traction — will no longer have to be buried in the mix of cat GIFs and Donald Trump memes flooding one's News Feed.
These well wishes can now be immortalized on video, much to the delight, or chagrin, of users.
Facebook presets which images and text greetings will be included in a fun 45-second clip of a colorful and explosive birthday cake, but the user can also tweak some parts of the video before posting the final product. The feature automatically kicks in once a user, whose birthday info appears on his or her profile, receives three or more tagged greetings or wall posts on that day.
Facebook: Top Virtual Birthday Hub
Facebook is now considered the top channel in cyberspace where people celebrate their birthdays, and the birthday recap video appears to be a friendly gesture from the company. It gives a user's special day a creative and personal spin.
While the automatic feature simply creates a short clip of messages and photos posted on a person's wall or tagged to a person's profile, it also serves as a reminder to users of how relevant Facebook is to their social media life. These birthday greetings, no matter how mundane, offer a glimpse into a person's virtual identity, and Facebook is making sure these snippets of a person's life is easily commemorated, cherished and shared across the social web.
Facebook's Other Commemorative Videos
To stay in the lead as the most popular social networking site, Facebook wants to be the platform people turn to for significant events in their life. This is seen in its latest News Feed algorithm update, which gives more prominence to posts by friends and family over those by fan pages and other organizations.
The birthday recap video gives one the idea that the company cares about users enough to auto-compile memories from these life events.
The feature is similar to other commemorative videos that Facebook instantly puts together, such as the Year In Review or the Happy Friends Day videos, which dig up FB posts that some might not always want to recall.
Of course, people can now filter out bad memories from these commemorative videos, but all in all, Facebook has once again discovered another way to tell the story of a person's life.
