Just caught the "Memorable Status Updates" widget on Facebook as I replied to a message, sitting there on the right side of the page. A quick Google gave this...

Facebook Resumes Tests Of Memorable Status Updates:

Facebook appears to be testing a reincarnation of memorable stories, which appeared a couple of times on the site and then disappeared.

The feature first showed up on December 16 for only about an hour, came back on January 12 and vanished at some point thereafter.

Now itโ€™s back and this time around, the feature has the label memorable status updates, and instead of showing you some of your own content, instead you see something from one of your friends.
...
And perhaps I got an odd selection, but relative to each friend shown, the status updates werenโ€™t the ones theyโ€™d consider most memorable. And they werenโ€™t ones that got the most likes nor comments. (emphasis mine)


The disconcerting thing to me is that my list was of a friend who was telling of her mother going off of life support, "ready to see jesus" (I think that's, if anything, more of that incredibly personal narrative than I should be sharing). Good heavens, really? What is Facebook trying to do here? What are the metrics for a "memorable" update?

I might guess that it's based on the number of people who went to your profile page after reading the update. One thing that this certainly tells you is that Facebook is measuring everything, and constantly trying to figure out new ways of processing what it means to be human through back-end algorithms.

Wow, some of the comments to the above article are just as interesting.

I want to block my own past status updates. The past no longer matters. I hope this is an option.

Yes. Just noticed it. Was a little disconcerted because the first friend whose "memorable status updates" I saw is in very ill health and for a minute I was worried he had died and this was some sort of memorial feature.

Yep - not memorable ... and most importantly, did not include anything to do with "me". It's in the past, has nothing to do with me, and is totally random. cannot see benefit.

How do I turn it off????

Don't like it - the people they put on my page I haven't really interacted with much...

Agree with several folks - past is NOT relevant and should not be dredged up. We should have an option to block our past posts from appearing.

They need to give us a way to control whose updates we are seeing. I don't want to see the statuses of people I've hidden in my feed. That's the whole point of hiding them.


There's a group (linked to by that last comment) that's asking that Facebook "lose memorable stories or give us control". Ten likes.

Honestly, that people are wrapped up in the "me" and "now" and don't realize that everything you do on Facebook, even what you erase, is probably in a giant RDBMS farm somewhere (with couples doubles on tape and another server or 10) forever isn't quite down with the FB.

(apologies for not quite getting the "couples doubles" clip from Bedazzled. It comes a few minutes after the stables quote.)

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