In what Facebook calls the “obvious evolution of profiles”, looping videos may be added instead of a profile picture. The profile picture and video will now be front-and-center of your profile – no longer off to the lefthand side of the screen – and enlarged.
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“It can be a visual status update to let your friends know what’s going on in your life today, or it can be your statement of solidarity for a cause you feel strongly about”, product managers Aigerim Shorman and Tony Hsieh wrote in a blog post. You’ve always had a photo that sits on the left-hand side, there’s always been a space to fill out basic information about yourself, and since almost the beginning, finding more photos of you has been really easy to find.
Just like the moving photographs in Harry Potter’s Daily Prophet, Facebook is to introduce a function which allows users to have a seven-second looping video as their Facebook profile picture.
New timed profile pictures will enable users to schedule pictures to begin and end during a set period of time. The company has also added new features, such as news articles that download quickly.
Facebook says it’ll be sprucing up the rest of the profile page starting with a refreshed layout.
From here, you’ll need to select a thumbnail, also known as the static shot that will show up in comments and Messenger.
Football fans who like the New England Patriots, for example, could celebrate a win by making the team’s logo their profile image for a week.
Clearly, all of this amounts to a huge mobile push for Facebook: We have a tendency to complacently consume via smartphone, but these tools are about creating.
On Wednesday, the world’s biggest social network announced developments to the mobile versions of profile pages, previously neglected for the more prominent “news feed”.
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Facebook is now rolling out these new features to iOS users in the United Kingdom and California.
