Nicely done - kind of made me realise how unimportant a lot of the stuff I post on Facebook is though! The photos were nice to see but all but one of the status updates were dumb things that only had relevance the day they were posted and had no lasting nostalgic value.
I'm guessing this was quite a technical challenge to produce a 1 minute HD video for every user on Facebook and have them all available today.
I don't see why that has to be the case. My posts it showed were about a new job I got in town, when my girlfriend got her first full-time teaching job, the completion of a really difficult junior year. I was impressed with how many interesting things it pulled out while avoiding drunk posts and party pictures.
On the contrary, Facebook is a great platform for important, meaningful things. It's just that most people don't think to use it that way. But I also think most people want to consume important, meaningful things, which would mean there's room for important, meaningful posts.
Wow. I found this rather poignant. I've been on Facebook for 6 years, and it struck me that most of the events it picked out were closer to the start of those 6 years than the present.
I definitely found it the reverse. I've been using FB for 8 years and I found it very poignant too but most of the images seemed to be from the last year or two.
I don't know if this correlates with the amount I posted those years or is just the effect of randomly picking a fairly small pool of images and events. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering_illusion
I found it funny, because of the mismatch between the "this is supposed to feel poignant" style of background music and the completely-lacking-in-poignancy material I tend to post on Facebook.
Maybe you (and your friends) used Facebook a lot more 6 years ago. I'm sure that's a big part of the algorithm: picking out the posts that got the most interaction.
Ya, i am on my phone using sprint's crappy 3g data that cuts out every 2 mins and it played without buffering one bit, i get that its a 30 sec video, but when vines or gifs dont play...
Does anyone have any information regarding the logistics of rendering 800+ million videos like this for each user on Facebook? I'm pretty sure it's not rendered on the fly.
I'm part of the team that built this which came from different parts of FB. I think we'll be getting some much needed rest after today, then I hope we can start telling the story of how we built it.
Will we be able to create a new video again? I deleted pics out of my album because I forgot they were even there and then the video disappeared and all I get is the thank you one...GREAT JOB though, what a wonderful idea. I have enjoyed so many people's videos
Ok that's probably what happened to me. After I viewed the video, I deleted some pics in my albums and I'm afraid it affected the video... and I would actually like to request for a new video.... please? Thank you!
Hi I viewed the fb lookback video that was made for me but I couldn't share it at the time of viewing since I was at work. When I went back to try to view it, it's no longer a video but looked more like a thank you message with a bunch of previous profile pictures... I was wondering how I could retrieve the video as I would like to share it? Thank you in advance!
Also, is there a reason the video becomes unavailable on /lookback after the first time you watch it? Damn near broke my heart when it vanished... had to get it back from cache.
This is a lot like Google's auto-awesome videos they came out with last year. On New Year's Eve I got a push notification from Google+ on my Android phone that said something like "Happy New Year!" and when I touched it I got a video that showed an auto-curated video of stuff that happened in 2013 based on my videos and pictures that auto-upload to G+. Pretty well done -- I showed it to my family and they were impressed.
After I saw the version they made for me, it let me pick the background music and re-rendered it to match the music I picked.
As someone who doesn't participate in memes, uploads a fair number of photos, and has been consistently on Facebook since 2006, my Lookback video was actually pretty awesome. The music matched the flow of the content, and even the mood of the content.
I found the handwritten Mark Zuckerberg signature a little pretentious. Maybe that's because of The Social Network, but I don't feel like other CEO's are using their own brand like that. It's like a fashion designer or even an artist signing their work... My video was not THAT good.
Am I missing something? It's just 6 photos that I've uploaded, 4 of which are from the past month. It looks like people here are talking about music, but the page is not playing music in Chrome.
Yes, mine is just a few photographs on a page. No video. I guess you need to have a certain number of photos uploaded/tagged on Facebook to create a video, whereas I make an effort to not upload any such content.
You may be on to something. I have turned off Platform (and so no applications work for me), and have set almost all other things to Friends only. All I get is six recent photos.
Same for me and I have been a user for 4-5 years with a few hundred photos and at least a few dozen statuses. Facebook managed to completely fail to impress me yet again.
As much as it was oddly enjoyable to see my life as a 1990's British chick-flick movie trailer, I did not relish all of the details. Like my most liked post in 7 years having 18 likes. Or digging up photographic memories of things long repressed.
How are they rendering these so quickly? There was no noticeable delay in the page load. The HD version is a 4.15MB mp4, with 1.19billion active monthly users that's 4.939PB of video to prerender. I thought perhaps they were rendering it either in the browser and passing a bytestream to the SWF (they're not), or starting the render on the server and streaming it down before it completed (unlikely as the video is coming from akamai). Anyone know?
I didn't see anything, either. There is my cover photo and a placeholder for profile picture. At first, I thought it was an adblocking extension in Chrome, so I tried it in vanilla firefox and saw the same thing.
Unlike others in the thread who delete everything they put on facebook, I do not.
I've been on Facebook for 9 years (apparently) and this actually did a pretty amazing job picking out the most important moments from my life over that period of time. It actually managed to jerk a tear from my eye as well but it cheated by showing a picture of my mom who passed away last year. YMMV, obviously, but for people who have been diligent about providing Facebook with curated content from their lives this will most likely hit home for them.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] threadI'm guessing this was quite a technical challenge to produce a 1 minute HD video for every user on Facebook and have them all available today.
Do you need to be logged in?
I got the error, too, until I didn't and this (see link) popped up.
Edit: It's still the same even after logging in.
Same for me
I don't know if this correlates with the amount I posted those years or is just the effect of randomly picking a fairly small pool of images and events. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering_illusion
"Thank you, [name]
10 years ago people started using Facebook to connect with each other in a new way. Thanks for being a part of it.
Mark and the Facebook team"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWoBAjovHT4
Still i need to agree that some of my best pictures are missing in the video.
Also, is there a reason the video becomes unavailable on /lookback after the first time you watch it? Damn near broke my heart when it vanished... had to get it back from cache.
After I saw the version they made for me, it let me pick the background music and re-rendered it to match the music I picked.
I like this. Good job, Facebook team.
How are they rendering these so quickly? There was no noticeable delay in the page load. The HD version is a 4.15MB mp4, with 1.19billion active monthly users that's 4.939PB of video to prerender. I thought perhaps they were rendering it either in the browser and passing a bytestream to the SWF (they're not), or starting the render on the server and streaming it down before it completed (unlikely as the video is coming from akamai). Anyone know?
Unlike others in the thread who delete everything they put on facebook, I do not.