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Tech

​Facebook Is Trying to Make Blogging Happen Again

With its Notes feature. From, you know, the late 2000s.

I'm an inveterate backstalker.

In case you're one of the lucky few who aren't familiar with the term (and probably haven't fallen victim), it's pretty vile. You go on Facebook, pick a friend, go on their old statuses and profile pictures, and like and/or comment on them. Leave everything else to the algorithms and sip on that tart chagrin chianti as you watch photos from their tenderer years resurface for all their friends to gush over.

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Part of that nostalgia hijacking extends to Facebook's "Notes," an often hidden feature of Facebook that essentially lets people have a Livejournal-esque blog attached to their profile. You could use it to post chain letters, play the bloggy version of Two Truths and a Lie, air grievances about your parents, teachers, and so on. Whatever teens in the late aughts were wont to do, you'll find some examples of it tucked away in their Notes section.

But Facebook is testing out a revamped version of Notes, as Tom Biesnecker, lead of user operations at Facebook, demonstrated earlier this Monday.

Image: Facebook

The note itself borrows a few pages from Medium, a blogging platform owned by Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone. You can see it from the header image to the neatly serifed fonts—Facebook's new Notes feature looks like an in-progress Medium port with little of the entrepreneurial drive.

But that might be too early an assessment: as it's a work in progress, the revamp is only available for a handful of users.

"We're testing an update to Notes to make it easier for people to create and read longer-form stories on Facebook," a Facebook spokesperson told the Verge.

Since Facebook cleared the character limit back in 2011, Notes has mostly died away, but the possibility that the revamp will render them more "mature" makes the whole enterprise feel weird. Facebook isn't really the place I'll look for longform pieces—it exists more as a space for photos, life updates, and articles.

In some ways I'll miss those old, poorly formatted notes. But there's a silver lining: those teen chain letter posts will look real damn pretty when this thing rolls out.