If you spent any time on Facebook Thursday, chances are your News Feed was filled with Friends Day videos.
The videos, which were similar to the social network's end of year videos, were rolled out Thursday to coincide with Facebook's 12-year anniversary. Of course, as with most new Facebook features, the videos were met with mixed reactions.
Even so, Friends Day, a holiday Facebook literally made up to coincide with its 12-year anniversary, soon took over Twitter.
Zuckerberg first called Feb. 4, the anniversary of Facebook's founding, "Friends Day" last year but this year marked the first time the company put out its specialized videos. While not surprising that the insanely shareable videos went viral on Facebook, Friends Day was also instantly viral on Twitter, where it was the top trending topic for most of the day. Here's how it went down.
At first, some users were, understandably, confused by the new videos — celebrating a holiday they had never heard of — suddenly appearing in their feeds.
Naturally, they turned to Twitter.
It seems that many users were, predictably, unhappy with Facebook's selection of photos for them. (Facebook, on its part, made the videos fully customizable so users were able to swap out the photos and memories that appeared in their montage, though that didn't stop anyone from criticizing the app's first choices.)
Still, some people liked the videos.
While others were forced to face some difficult truths.
Regardless of how they were received though, it's difficult to see the videos as anything other than a win for Facebook — even if many people didn't like them. Facebook is now so huge that even a relatively small new feature, like a personalized video tool, can make massive waves throughout the Internet.
Consider this, the #FriendsDay hashtag was trending on Twitter for almost the entire day. At the time of this writing Thursday afternoon, the topic was near the top of Twitter's trending topics even though it wasn't on Facebook's list of top trends.
And, given that all this is taking place less than a week after Twitter execs took Facebook to task for referring to Twitter as "social media" in its list of trending topics following Kanye West's epic tweetstorm, it seems safe to say Facebook's Friends Day experiment was a success.
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