For the longest time, Facebook Notes was ignored. It still had the same UI we first experienced when we first signed up for Facebook. It was a beloved feature where it functioned as your own personal blog where you would share funny anecdotes or any other random thing. Well, Facebook decided to revamp it more than a month ago and it seems it has been rolled out worldwide.
As described before, what Facebook did was essentially revamp Notes to look like Medium. If you don’t know Medium, it is a blogging platform that emphasizes on landscape photo design and a generally “flat” UI with a white background. It is a great platform to read articles thanks to the magazine layout and you generally find yourself reading the rather long articles easily. Facebook seems to have “borrowed” their layout and revamped it to look a typical Medium blog.
Back in 2009, accessing your Notes was pretty easy to access because Facebook was not as complicated as it is right now. I’m quite sure you don’t use Notes as much as you did back then and to access it, you have to go to your profile, click the more tab, click manage sections and subsequently drag the “Notes” tab up top. When you login on Facebook from the desktop, Notes appears among your apps (For some reason).
The layout is very simple with a bar at the top where you drag a photo (hi-res preferred) to your post then below where you add a title and lastly a place to add the actual content. In the process of writing your post, you have a choice of two heading styles,provision to add bullets & numbering and blockquotes. To sum it all up, the post is signed up with your Facebook name complete with the day, date, month and year the post was written. At the bottom, you can set the privacy settings where you can set who can see the post either you only, only friends or anyone.
This move by Facebook to revamp notes is seen as an effort to keep publishers to the Facebook ecosystem. They have improved their video platform, introduced Instant articles for other known publishers to post content on Facebook, introduced Facebook Signal to target journalists, introduced Livestreaming but for verified accounts and updated Pages with several key features. This is all an effort to trap publishers to its platform and by the fact they have a huge user base, their efforts may bear fruit in the future.
