This is an archival story that predates current editorial management.
This archival content was written, edited, and published prior to LAist's acquisition by its current owner, Southern California Public Radio ("SCPR"). Content, such as language choice and subject matter, in archival articles therefore may not align with SCPR's current editorial standards. To learn more about those standards and why we make this distinction, please click here.
In years past a birthday meant presents, phone calls from family, and most recently thousands of “Happy Birthday” notes on your Facebook wall from people you haven’t talked to since the third grade.
But now Facebook may be changing the way they do birthday feeds, altering the culture of birthdays once again, according to Inside Facebook.
First they brought back the upcoming birthdays option on the right side bar, no longer hiding it under the ‘see more’. Although minor, it seemed to cause more of an uproar than anticipated. But Facebook must have received more complaints because they are changing birthday applications once again.
Birthday messages will now be condensed under a single link on people’s homepage. It will be similar to if you see “x number of people are coming to your event”. Instead it would say “X number of people wrote on blank’s wall for their birthday… ‘view all posts’.
Facebook says they hope this will encourage people to write more personal notes on their friend’s wall. If the note is personalized it will not show up under the generic collapse function.
If there is positive feedback the collapsible feature may also migrate to the individual’s profile page so the birthday messages don’t drown out other, possibly more important messages on the wall, according to Mashable.
What do you think… is this a positive change or negative move for Facebook?
