For the past 24 hours, my Facebook newsfeed has been predominantly filled with just two things:
1) People sharing those cutesy automated “Look Back” videos that Facebook made for most of its users to celebrate the company’s 10th anniversary
2) People complaining that they hate their Look Back
Don’t like yours? Too many pictures of your ex? Don’t sweat it too much. Facebook is working on an edit tool, we’ve learned.
I’d heard from a source just after the Look Back videos started rolling out that there was supposed to have been an edit tool built in — apparently, it just wasn’t ready to go in time for Facebook’s anniversary. The tool would allow you to pick alternative photos/clips if you weren’t into the ones that Facebook’s Emotion Bot 4000* picked for you.
[* I might have just made this name up. And by “might” I mean I did.]
Sure enough, a support page for the “Look Back” feature has lingering mentions of an “Edit Your Movie” button that doesn’t exist, further suggesting that the option was supposed to have been there to begin with.
I reached out to Facebook about a few issues users were having with Look Back, and a rep from the company confirmed the feature:
“We will be launching an Edit feature soon that will allow people to change moments in their movies or update the ones they shared. I don’t have exact timing at the moment, but this will enable people to remove a post from the movie that was pre-selected and change it to a different one.”
With Facebook getting into video automation and building up a user interface for making tweaks, it’s pretty easy to imagine that this won’t be a one-off thing for the company. With all of the content people post on Facebook, they can do all sorts of these videos. Annual recaps of your year on New Years Day? Auto-magic video compilations following an event, made up of your and your friends’ uploaded pictures? Now that they’ve built out the base functionality, turning it into a proper, regularly occuring feature is a matter of tweaking the auto-selection algorithms.
If you still haven’t figured out how to find your look back, here’s the link
