14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook has started rolling out a redesign of its Notes feature which allows users to share small texts with their friends, outside of their Facebook timeline.
The Notes feature was introduced on August 22, 2006, and from the beginning it was advertised as a blogging system, even if it looked nothing of the sort.
As time went by, Facebook added support for tags and embedded images, and it also allowed users to import their blog content from sites like LiveJournal, Blogger, Xanga, and a few others (a feature which they dropped around a year ago).
Facebook Notes failed to endear itself to users in the past
Despite all this, Facebook Notes failed miserably, not only at becoming popular with users, but even worse, failed at looking like a blog.
Just admit it people. Whenever you visited someone's Notes section, didn't you think that someone's blog entries were regular Facebook posts? You probably did.
With yesterday's update, Facebook has improved Notes even more, allowing users to add a huge cover photo (banner, header image, hero image, or whatever this feature is called in 2015), format text with headers, insert quotes, and even add bullet lists.
Additionally, the image embedding process has been boosted with the ability to add captions, and even resize photos accordingly, to better fit the content.
Now if it walks and talks like a blog, it must be a blog, right? Correct!
While previously Facebook Notes looked like an uglier brother of your Facebook timeline, with these recent updates, the section is now starting to look like a regular, fully-functional blog. The problem is that it looks too much like another blog. Medium to be more precise. While this isn't a problem, we would have liked to see some more original features being added instead.
This is how Facebook Notes blog entries look like after the update.
On a side note, just a day before the Facebook Notes overhaul, Facebook also rebranded the free app offered by the Internet.org platform as "Free Basics."