If you hopped over to Facebook.com/Lookback on the social media giant’s tenth birthday, you may have experienced any one of these responses to the video it generated using your Timeline: nostalgia, feeling as though you were posthumously watching a montage of your life, or slight curiosity as to why Facebook hadn’t done a better job in selecting more important photos you’d shared. If only there was a way to edit that video…
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Well, Facebook is on the case. The company confirmed to TechCrunch that it was always its intention to give users the ability to customise their videos (and remove any random or less-than-flattering snapshots), but the team simply ran out of time ahead of the February 4th birthday. Even so, the support page for the feature still provides guidance on how users can edit their movies (by checking images and stories they’d like to include from their Timeline).
A spokesperson explained:
We will be launching an edit feature soon that will allow people to change moments in their movies or update the ones they shared. I don’t have exact timing at the moment, but this will enable people to remove a post from the movie that was pre-selected and change it to a different one.
Facebook assigned the task of generating potentially billions of customised videos to a dedicated team in the run up to the anniversary, who worked to put the posts to music and optimised Facebook’s servers to reduce the time it take to render a video from 17 minutes to just one.
Of course, Facebook has rolled out similar features before (like its Year in Review page which shows you the highlights of the previous year), but this one reinforces the potential ways the team can showcase users’ updates and continue to encourage them to keep sharing their lives in photos and status updates.
