Facebook Friendship Pages collect the shared past of two friends, from photos to relationship status changes. So will the sites' users appreciate the sentiment, or resent it?
Have you ever found yourself perusing Facebook, wishing there were a convenient way for you to sift through exchanges between you and your closest friends? Well whether or not you’ve felt this way, it’s happening.
Starting today, the social networking site will begin implementing a new feature called Friendship Pages, courtesy of Facebook software engineer Wayne Kao. According to Kao, his inspiration came from skimming the pages of his close friends, and the warm, fuzzy feeling that came with it. “I realized that a similarly magical experience was possible if all of the photos and posts between two friends were brought together. You’d remember that first Wall post with your best friend, of the funny photo from a night out. You may even see that moment when your favorite couple met at a party you all attended.”
Describing the development as a “labor of love,” Kao goes on to explain that the premise of Friendship Pages is to act as a virtual and very personal biography of the evolution of a friendship between two people. The feature will display Wall posts, comments, photos, shared events, mutual friends, and more between any two friends, and users are able to view this via links that will show up (if they haven’t already) along with typical mini feed stories.
We foresee two reactions to this. One, people who truly use Facebook to connect with friends who they don’t have easy opportunities to see will really like it. Scrolling through your mini feed to find updates on what the people you actually care about are doing is time-consuming, and will usually result in getting sidetracked. If you have friends internationally, being automatically able to visit a collection of your relationship could be nice.
On the other hand, didn’t Facebook just get hit by a barrage of complaints about Photo Memories? It seems like the two features have extremely similar purposes: stir up a little nostalgia, help you relive the past. And people overwhelmingly hated it, letting the social networking site know that maybe we’d like to personally decide what moments and people to revisit. The same criticisms are likely to be lodged against Friendship Pages, include the most specific one regarding exes. Or worse, flings – anyone else have zero interest in remembering how you met the coworker you made out with twice in college?
But, like Photo Memories, it’s easy to ignore. And as it goes with many of Facebook’s additions, the critiques will furiously pour in, only to die down, eventually causing everyone to wonder why they were so upset in the first place.
So if you have no interest, ignore the little link that serves as the ghost of your friendships’ past. For everyone who enjoys scrolling through sentimental moments, it just got considerably easier and monumentally sappier.
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