Remember the notes feature in Facebook?
Perhaps you created a note a few years back, to express an extended idea or to post your favorite cake recipe? Perhaps you have a handful of friends who still actually use notes, obscurely, to update everyone on their latest, super-long political opinions?
Facebook is looking to revive this feature from the dead, or from the margins at least, as the company has recently given notes a major facelift – the first in almost five years.
Facebook Notes look just like blog posts
The refreshed design makes notes look more like blog posts, rather than longer Facebook updates (before, the notes were essentially one long block of the same text, with very little visual interest).
The company said the changes are geared toward making the notes feature more attractive and customizable. “Facebook has always been a place to share your thoughts with friends, and notes are a meaningful way for people to do that,” said Isaac Salier-Hellendag, a Facebook user interface engineer, in a blog post announcing the new changes.
Facebook still has some ground to cover
It’s clear that Facebook is also looking to attract users interested in using the feature as a micro-blogging platform. The notes user can now add a cover photo, caption and resize photos, and format text into headers, quotes or bullets.
The result is a clean design aesthetic that looks a lot like Medium, a competing blogging platform that Twitter and Blogger co-founder Evan Williams created.
Easy enough for your mom
The revamped notes are easy to use–easy enough for your mom, or those obscure friends with the political opinions–but the notes user cannot create a note from their mobile phone. Which means that while Facebook is trying to be all things internet to all people, they still have some ground to cover.
And committed bloggers will probably stick to their old blogging platforms, leaving Facebook’s 1.5 billion users to their re-posting, baby picture sharing, short status updating, news-feed clogging ways.
Here is an example of a live Note, and if you want to create a note, go to Facebook.com/Notes and click “Write Note” at the top right to try it out.
