Facebook rolls out new features including ‘on this day’, embedded posts

Facebook seems to have been on a bit of a mission over the last few hours, introducing a couple of new features namely, the ability to embed certain posts and something called “on this day”.

The first feature has been around on other social networks for a while now. Twitter first introduced embedded tweets during its redesign in 2011. Even Instagram, which Facebook owns, unveiled its take on the feature a few weeks ago. It seems therefore that Facebook is playing catch up to some degree.

Still, the feature will be welcomed by journalists and online bloggers. When embedded, says Facebook, posts can include pictures, videos, hashtags and other content. People can also like and share the post directly from the embed.

There are however limitations on what you can embed, although they mostly seem pretty reasonable. Only posts set to public can be embedded on other web sites.

To start, Facebook is working with CNN, Huffington Post, Bleacher Report, PEOPLE and Mashable so those publications can embed public Facebook posts, with broader availability coming soon.

On This Day

The other feature to be rolled out by the big blue social network is On This Day, which shows a list of status updates and content uploaded to a person’s social network exactly a year ago.

According to The Next Web, the feature is available for a number of people using the latest version of Facebook for the web and can be accessed by hitting the downward arrow underneath the News Feed categories in the top right-hand corner of the page.

Facebook then assembles a list of content, along with a picture from an album uploaded a year previously, with the tagline ‘What your friends were up to a year ago today’.

As The Next Web notes On This Day, it actually a re-tooling of a feature Facebook first brought out in August 2011, which disappeared pretty quickly afterwards.

Perhaps now though, it’s figured out a way to better integrate the feature and capitalise on people’s ingrained sense of nostalgia.