Facebook Look Back Videos

Submission 13,289

Part of a series on Facebook / Meta. [View Related Entries]

About

Facebook Look Back Videos are personalized video montages highlighting each Facebook user's life events and milestones, as well as most liked photos and status updates, in chronological order. The feature was released in early February 2014 to coincide with the social network's 10th anniversary.

Origin

On February 4th, 2014, Facebook unveiled a special feature called "Look Back,"^[3] which provides every user with a personalized slideshow reflecting on his or her life events and notable status updates, in celebration of the company's 10th anniversary. Users can view their Look Back Videos and share them publicly by posting them to their timelines.

Each video, about 62-seconds long in duration and accompanied by a subtle instrumental soundtrack, opens with the year the user joined the site and covers a selection of his/her first milestones on the site, most liked statuses and pictures. According to Facebook, the feature will be available for a month, though videos shared on timelines will not disappear.^[5]

Spread

On February 5th, The Huffington Post^[4] published a piece titled “Nobody Wants To See Your Facebook Look Back Video,” suggesting there was already some frustration and fatigue over the sudden influx of the videos in users’ feeds a day after their release. Also on February 5th, SFGate^[6] published a post titled “11 Facebook look-back videos flooding your feed” which outlined different types of Look Back videos you might see in your feed. Later that same day, Facebook reported that "hundreds of millions of users" had watched their Look Back videos.

Also on the 5th, John Berlin uploaded a video to his YouTube channel^[1] explaining that his son had died in 2012 and he would love to see his Look Back video, but he could not access his son’s Facebook account. Later that day, Berlin was contacted by a Facebook representative and assured that he would get a Look Back video for his son’s account within a few days.^[2] Within 24 hours, the video had gained over 900,000 views.

Notable Examples

Several parodies of Facebook Look Back videos have been uploaded to YouTube, including ones for Kanye West, Rob Ford (shown top, right), Justin Bieber (bottom, left), and Bruce Jenner (bottom, right).