Dubai: If you enjoy sending birthday wishes to friends and family on Facebook, then you may enjoy using the new birthday video feature, which will slowly be rolled out to users in the upcoming months.
Currently, a total of 164 million monthly active users in the Middle East are accessing Facebook with more than 45 million people sending birthday wishes on the platform daily.
The new feature will provide a customised video including either a photo of a user and their close friend or — if there is no tagged photo available — their friend’s profile picture, which will be shown to you on the day of a close friend’s birthday.
“The photo will be accompanied by a colourful picture frame and a song. The video is intended to be shared on your friend’s timeline with your choice of caption, and you can also tag the person or people in the post and add a location to it,” a Facebook spokesperson told Gulf News.
The 10-second video, which is set to music developed by the Facebook in-house music team, is designed to be a gift for users to send to their close friends.
“Like our other personalised videos, we created these videos because we wanted to make the birthday experience on Facebook even more delightful and meaningful for the special relationships in users’ lives,” added the spokesperson.
Birthday features
Birthdays have been a part of Facebook since the platform’s launch. In 2005, Facebook Events was created to help people plan and organise personal events such as birthday parties, celebrations and other more intimate gatherings with friends. “In fact, when Facebook first rolled out and was only available on college campuses, Events was called ‘My Parties’,” said the spokesperson.
In 2013, Facebook introduced notifications for birthdays, reminding users of their friends’ birthdays, while in 2014 a handy ‘birthday card’ was launched, which shows up on a user’s news feed on their birthday and aggregates their friend’s birthday wishes, including selected profile pictures of friends who have written on their timeline that day.
Two years later, Facebook launched a ‘birthday cam’ feature that lets you record up to 15 seconds worth of video birthday wishes for friends on their special day. Users are able to record a video, swipe through to apply fun birthday-themed static or animated frames around it, then post it on their friend’s timeline for a birthday surprise.
Shortly after, Facebook introduced the birthday fund-raisers feature in 2017. This feature allows users to start a fund-raiser for their birthday or donate to a fund-raiser to honour their friend’s birthday.
