If Timehop and Facebook taught us anything, it’s that people sure do love walking down those memory lanes.
A year ago, Facebook launched On This Day, a daily reminder of your activities on the social network that happened on that same date. For its first anniversary, Facebook announced that the feature now sees 60 million daily visitors, and 155 million users have subscribed to receiving notifications.
Even if you don’t regularly visit the On This Day tab, you’ll often see a memory (oftentimes a photo) resurfaced at the top of your feed the first time you log onto Facebook for the day. Facebook says it uses AI to rank what to feature up top, and learns in real-time how to predict which memories are most meaningful to you.
It also looks at your usage behaviors and settings like whether or not you’ve blocked a former friend (an ex-lover, perhaps) to avoid resurfacing interactions with someone you may no longer want to think about. In Facebook’s words, the AI learns “how to tell when some memories that started off as pleasant became unpleasant.”
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If that’s still not your thing, however, you always opt out or disable notifications. Facebook says its team will continue to research and build its AI to make the algorithm even more tailored to your experience, so you’ll just have to check On This Day a year from now to see how far it can actually go.
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