It's about time, don't you think?
Facebook announced via a press release last Friday that they are "rolling out" an update for a feature long-overlooked by Facebook users: Notes.
Facebook User Interface Engineer Isaac Salier-Hellendag exemplifies in a written statement how users can take advantage of Notes:
With this update, you can add a cover photo that represents what your note is all about. You can caption and resize photos, and format your text into headers, quotes or bullets.
For instance, you can recap your summer vacation or an important time in your life to update the people you care about. You can voice your opinion on something you saw in the news or write an open letter you want to share with the world. You can share a special recipe with a bulleted list of ingredients and photos of each step.
The improved Facebook Notes appears to be upgraded to a "blog post" layout -- a major step up from its original format of a simple white page. Fortune notes that the foremost version of the neglected Facebook feature was mainly useful for writing a "long-form post about a memory, experience or opinion, among other things and it appeared in a special section on their profiles." Mashable also remarks that the last significant update to the feature was 2010.
The long-ignored Facebook feature also, notably, did not get as well-known as the other Facebook features such as the location check-in. With the upgrade, Fortune informs that users may now customize their "notes" with a cover photo. In addition, they may now caption and resize photos as well as format the text into headers, quotes or bullets. Fortune notes that it "is overall better-designed thanks to font and text options." While there are built-in buttons for it, the new Notes allows the user to bold, underline, and italicize text via keyboard shortcuts, as per Mashable. With the upgrade, the new Notes deviates from its old "extended status update" format. According to Mashable, the new and visually-appealing layout of Notes is strikingly similar to Twitter co-founder Ev Williams' blogging startup, Medium.
The brand new Facebook Notes is now publicly available -- on both the website and app version. However, note creation is limited to the web as of the moment. No word from Facebook if this will remain in the future.
You can navigate and explore the new Facebook Notes here.