#fblookback

[mara-123xd]

.teaser of my #fblookback

[donnaandjessicamae]

Part One on FaceBook Look Back Video First 15secs on Instagram @dcroftart : Follow me!

[drcaliban]

On Tuesday Facebook celebrated it’s 10th anniversary. As part of this celebration it released a feature called lookback. By going to https://www.facebook.com/lookback users would find a 60+ second video pulled from information on their timeline showing their personal history on Facebook.

This looked cool so I decided to go get mine. When I clicked the link instead of seeing a movie I just saw six pictures from my timeline and a thank you note. Thinking I had just done it wrong I stated to investigate.

It turns out I was not alone. Many users were complaining that they could not access the video either. These fell into two categories, those who had a video at one point and lost it, and those like me that never had the option and just got the six pictures.

Going through Facebook help files the only reference I found to the issue was this:

If you aren’t seeing A Look Back movie when you visit facebook.com/lookback, it may be because you have not shared very many things on Facebook. Depending on how long you’ve been on Facebook and how much you’ve shared, you’ll see a movie, a collection of photos or a thank you card.

A lot of people who have been unable to get a video have stated that they are active on Facebook and have been for years so this does not make sense to them.

From reading this and digging into the responses that users have gotten I think I have figured out what is going on.

Clearly Facebook had to set up an algorithm in order to create the videos from people’s timelines. The algorithm clearly cannot mine information from every timeline, due to who knows what factors, but I suspect it depends on the type of sharing a user does rather than simply the amount. For those who lost videos apparently they edited their timeline after it was made and the algorithm doesn’t like that either and they end up with the six pictures as well.

So I think that with the anniversary coming up Facebook decided to release the flawed algorithm on time rather than hold off and perfect it while missing the date. I have seen nothing yet to contradict this theory.

The unfortunate effect of this is that Facebook has inadvertently made all the users who only get the six pictures feel like they are the kid who did not get picked for the team in PE. This is compounded by the fact that other than the bit from the help file I quoted above they really haven’t addressed this, so I think this is just the way it is.

If anyone else has more information on this I would love to hear about it.

Update: It looks like the algorithm has been fixed. I finally got a video, and it looks like people are reporting it working across the board.