Hey Facebook, will you listen to me??
We all love Facebook. Personally, I use Facebook for networking in my community, reading educational stuff on pages like The Hacker News™ and yeah, pet videos!!! My overall daily use of Facebook is about 3 hours, just little less than YouTube(Yes, I’m always online!). So, basically point that I’m making here is that, Facebook is kind of integral part of my life, and same is the case for almost everyone. Facebook has also been very progressive in every possible way to make us happy all the time, which is the secret of its long term popularity worldwide.
Facebook has been adding features in their ecosystem almost every week that have taken it from a inter-university social network to a worldwide giant with more than a billion users. But, not all of the features they have introduced are accepted with open arms. Some of them are criticised and Facebook had to improvise from time to time, and that’s what makes them so successful. I’m going to make one suggestion, and I hope that Facebook will listen to me. These are, of course, my opinions, and are open for criticism.
In October 2015 Facebook rolled out Profile Videos for Android and iOS platforms that enabled users to create a 7-second constantly looping video of themselves and set it as a profile video, which can take place of the profile picture that we all knew. The described it as Improving mobile profile in this blog post.
It rolled out in my country few months ago, and I have never tried it because I thought it was a bad idea. Before writing this article, I tried to do some Google searches about ‘how it was received worldwide’, expecting some surveys or numbers indicating its popularity, and, Nothing!!!
All it returned were the tutorials(!) on ‘How to set Facebook Profile Video??’ and year old news and articles about ‘Facebook launching Profile Videos’.
This is why I think I might be right. Profile videos are not very popular, nobody’s talking about them. I haven't tried it, and neither have I seen any of the profile I visit using it. And the audience I have sampled is quite collective as well as representative as they were quick to adopt other features like Temporary Profile Picture & Facebook Live. The reasons why Facebook Profile Video didn’t do as well are:
- People are used to watching or even visualising videos in Landscape mode. Idea of a video playing in a Square Box is odd if not repulsive.
- Automatically generated GIF would do a lot better than a 7-second looping video because frankly, there wouldn’t be much difference.
- In a profile video one can only show his face properly, but what people really want to show in videos is what they are doing or where they are, which is not possible to show in detail in a profile video.
- The profile video is only available on mobile apps and not on the web which is another big turnoff.
- No promotion from the founder. That’s true!! I scrolled down all the way to October 2015 to verify this. Zuck is generally always promoting all the new products but I didn’t find any post on his wall regarding this feature.
I guess that covers everything I have against the Facebook profile video. And yeah, I do have alternative solution!!!
Instead of Profile Video if Facebook launches Cover Video it would cover(!) many of my issues like, playing video in landscape mode and showing the surroundings as well as our activities.It would be much more interesting to see such a fun video at full width in the background of our static profile image.
Facebook, think about it…
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