Facebook Notes

» see facebook.com/notes as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

facebook notes was the part of facebook where you could write a paragraph longer than a status update without using a third-party blog. it shipped on august 22 2006, only a few months after open registration had opened facebook past universities. the feature had a basic rich-text editor, photo embedding, a notion of "drafts", and an option to import an external blog by rss. you could tag friends and comment, and on a profile your notes had their own tab.

i used facebook around 2008 to 2014 in the same way most turkish friends did. friend lists from university, photo albums, status updates, the usual. notes were not the part i wrote in, but they were the part you sometimes read when a high school classmate decided to write something serious. there was always at least one note circulating that had been tagged with twenty people, and you would scroll the list of tags first to see if you were in it.

february 2009 was the peak. the "25 random things about me" meme had everyone tagging twenty-five friends to post their own list of twenty-five random facts about themselves. nearly five million notes were posted that week. it was the single biggest engagement spike facebook had recorded up to that point. for one short month notes felt like the central thing on the site.

~ the dossier ~

~ the unraveling ~

after 2009 notes faded fast. the trend on the platform was toward shorter mobile-first composition and then toward video. nobody wanted to write a five-paragraph note from a phone in 2012. facebook tried a redesign in september 2015 that added cover photos and bigger typography, an attempt to make notes look more like medium posts. it did not catch.

by 2017 the feature was clearly orphaned. there was no link to "create a note" anywhere on the new facebook composer. the notes that existed kept existing, but no new ones were being made at scale.

~ how it actually ended ~

on october 23 2020, facebook quietly added a notice to the notes section saying that the feature would become read-only on october 31. eight days. after the cutoff you could view your old notes for a brief window but could not edit or create new ones. inside a few weeks the notes were gone from profiles entirely. there is no facebook.com/notes page anymore. there is no migration path. if you did not download your notes archive before then, they are not on facebook in any reachable form now.

some users got an export through the "download your information" tool. most did not know about it. the 25 random things meme is therefore one of the worst-preserved viral moments of the late 2000s. millions of self-portraits in list form, written for an audience of twenty tagged friends, gone with the feature.

~ what it left ~

facebook notes was the last serious attempt to put long-form text inside facebook proper. its death said something about what facebook had decided it was, and what it had decided to leave to substack and medium and the wider blog web. the lesson the platform took from the 2009 spike was that the engagement was about tagging, not about writing. the writing got dropped. the tagging stayed.

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