Facebook has announced ‘Friends Awards’ as part of its annual Friends Day celebration. Of course most people associate friendship day as the one on the first Sunday of August, but Facebook has made its own Friends Day on February 4, which also happens to be the social media company’s birthday. Facebook was started on February 4 in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, who is currently CEO and co-founder of the company. Facebook is turning 14 this year.
As part of ‘Friends Day’ experience, Facebook will show people messages on the top of their News Feed with a personalised video wishing them a Happy Friends Day. Once the video is over, users will be shown Friends Awards from the video as well. Users will have the option of editing out this ‘Friends Award’ list and create their own or go with the pre-decided ones. Users will be able to nominate their select friends from the list of templated awards, according to Facebook.
The ‘Friends Award’ will be based on the kind of activities a user has shared with a particular friend. For instance, one can nominate a friend as ‘Bestie’ or ‘Great Listener,’ or ‘Knows How to Make Me Laugh’ etc, according to some examples listed by the company. Facebook will also create short videos to highlight what it calls “remarkable friendships.” Finally, the Facebook camera will also get three new Camera filters to mark the company’s fourteenth birthday. Facebook’s camera has also been revamped similar to Instagram and has the option of sharing Stories for users, along with live filters, hashtags, etc.
Facebook recently posted its Q4 2017 and annual results with ad revenues beating Wall Street expectations. However, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg also announced the company planned to reduce the number of viral videos it was showing to people. In fact, it has already begun to implement this to its algorithm for News Feed. Zuckerberg said that while this would reduce time spent on Facebook, the focus for 2018 is to help people have more meaningful connections on the social network. Facebook has also announced changes to News Feed to reduce content from publishers, and instead show more of what a user’s friends are sharing.
Facebook claims that in 2017, there twice as many posts about friendship than in 2016, and that celebrating friendships and birthdays were some of the top activities on the network. Facebook also claims more than 600 million ‘Friendversary’ videos were shared in 2017 on the site. However, Facebook is facing a problem where more original content sharing on the network has slowed down and instead moved to more networks like Instagram, WhatsApp, etc.
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