Facebook Announces Animated Profile Pics

All of this looks almost identical whether you’re on desktop or mobile-which is a little odd, really.

The social network is redesigning user profiles beginning Wednesday, and perhaps the biggest change – or the one that promises to be the most entertaining or obnoxious depending on the friend – is that users can now upload a profile video instead of a static photo.

Facebook also announced improved personal profile controls. You just have to keep it to 101 characters.

Product managers Aigerim Shorman and Tony Hsieh write that on Facebook’s News Feed and profiles, the company has “seen people create and view more videos than ever before”. That is, you’ll be able to pick and choose (and reorder) which public About fields are displayed.

The latest upgrades to the social media giant are focused on your profile photo and your profile layout in general. The new featured photos space is an option-so don’t worry, Facebook won’t populate this field for you if you don’t want it there. “While this space is visible to anyone who visits your profile, you have full control of what information appears here”. The company said it’ll be “rolling them out to more people soon”. It also might be the single most-used home for iPhone Live Photos.

There are a few reasons Facebook may be tweaking profiles. Think of it like a profile picture timer of sorts. The profile picture is now centered, and larger. Once the selected duration expires, the temporary photo will disappear and your most recent profiler will reappear. This is probably meant to address the discomfort of having to ask yourself “am I done visually supporting [insert cause here] with my profile photo?” and taking action to change it. Now, Facebook will do the dirty work for you. Let us know on Twitter or in the Facebook comments. But that doesn’t mean the updates totally forsake the web.

Part of Facebook’s success on mobile has come from efforts to make its app for mobile devices both faster and less data hungry .

“Today we’re starting to test the next step in an obvious evolution of profiles: profile videos”.

Again, this is all experimental – but Facebook says these features will roll out to more users soon.