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Facebook’s “A Look Back” Inspires Sharing, Spoofs, and Sentimental Moments

Facebook launched “A Look Back,” a feature which allows users to see a Facebook generated one minute video of their biggest Facebook moments, in honor of the sites tenth birthday last week. Site members can edit and share these movies with their friend via their Facebook wall. In its first week, over 200 million people chose to view their video and half of these chose to share it with their friends. The videos show most-liked posts and some of the shared photos and statuses from each person’s Facebook page, set to instrumental music.

Since Facebook launched the feature last week, there have been an increasing number of parodies. These have included Facebook ‘Look Back’ videos for TV and movie characters, such as Optimus Prime from the Transformers series and Walter White from the hit TV series, Breaking Bad, which ended last year. Many people have shared these videos in addition to their own.

For some people, receiving a Facebook ‘Look Back’ has been a sentimental experience. For one father, the new Facebook feature allowed for celebration of his son’s short life. He released a video on YouTube asking CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook Team to make a video for his son’s page. Facebook responded by granting his request and promising to try to look into doing more for grieving families in the future.

Facebook created their “A Look Back” feature as a gift to their users. However, not everyone is happy about these videos. There has been a lot of backlash across social media, with people claiming that the videos are annoying. Some individuals were unhappy about their own videos, claiming that they were an invasion of privacy. The edit feature was added in part to remedy these claims. The videos will remain available for viewing until the end of the month, at which point they will disappear if they haven’t been posted to your wall.