Facebook’s throwbacks that serve up old photos of friends (or remind you that, yes, you used to share those annoying memes, too) are getting a new look. The popular On This Day tool is getting refreshed and relocated inside a new tool called Memories. Launching on June 11, Memories houses a more organized look at your social past.
By relocating the On This Day feature into its own Memories section, Facebook brings more organization to the feature that was previously organized by day. The change also mixes in the occasional Memories that pop up at times in the news feed, like holiday memories and memories from the previous month.
Inside the new Memories page, the throwbacks are organized into four different sections. The first houses On This Day, the social snapshots Facebook users are accustomed to that list past posts shared on the same day in previous years. A second section houses friendversaries with a list of the friend requests accepted on that day, instead of mixing in the requests with the status updates and photos.
Recaps of Memories houses those occasional memories that will pop up after a month ends or after seasons. Memories You May Have Missed is for users who don’t check the Memories section on a regular basis, and includes top memories from the past week.
The newly rethought section is located in the Memories bookmark on the lefthand side on a desktop, or through the “more” menu on a mobile app. Users can choose to continue to get notifications for Memories, while the occasional news feed Memory pop-up isn’t going away either. Users can also navigate to facebook.com/memories to find the throwbacks.
More than 90 million people use the previous On This Day tool, Facebook says, which amounts to a significant slice of Facebook’s 2.2 billion worldwide users. While the feature is popular, others find the feature also digs up unpleasant memories like exes, and Facebook has used such critical input to refine the tool, the company says. While the platform has had different memory-focused tools before, the On This Day tool launched in 2015.
“We know that memories are deeply personal — and they’re not all positive,” Oren Hod, Facebook product manager, wrote in a blog post. “We try to listen to feedback and design these features so that they’re thoughtful and offer people the right controls that are easy to access. We work hard to ensure that we treat the content as part of each individual’s personal experience, and are thankful for the input people have shared with us over the past three years.”
Memories began rolling out to users on June 11.
