Facebook's 'On This Day' to Let You Relive What You and Your Friends Were Doing a Year Ago Today
July 31, 2013 — -- Living in the present is overrated. OK, maybe not entirely, but Facebook seems to want you to spend some more time remembering life a year ago. The social network has started testing an "On This Day" feature that lets you reminisce about what you and your friends were doing a year ago today.
"We are currently testing a feature that will show users content from their News Feed 'from a year ago today,'" a Facebook spokeswoman confirmed to ABC News. The feature was first reported by The Next Web and Inside Facebook.
Select users are able to visit facebook.com/feed/todayinhistory and see a feed of updates from friends exactly as they appeared a year ago. The page features not only year-old statuses from friends, but also a list on the right-hand side of the page that details some other big milestones or events from the month.
While a few ABC News reporters using Facebook's new News Feed layout have access to the feature on the right-hand rail of their feeds, many others didn't have access. Even when they visited the Today in History site, it didn't bring up the feed.
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Facebook frequently tests features with a select group and then rolls it out to all of its users. For instance, Facebook just rolled out its Graph Search function to all U.S. users and is still in the process of rolling out the redesigned News Feed.
Other apps like Timehop let you similarly relive your past days on social media services, including Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. Additionally, before the New Year, Twitter and Facebook rolled out features to let you relive your best moments from 2012 on the respective networks.
Facebook has been experimenting with a series of new Timeline features, including one that will soon allow users to tell the service why they dislike a post in their feed. The feature, which Facebook told ABC News about last week, will let the social network improve the selection of content it displays to users, including ads they might be interested in.
Today, for the first time since becoming a publicly traded company 14 months ago, Facebook's stock hit its original $38 a share price.
