Facebook updates a long-ignored feature

Facebook has made it easier for users to share to Notes on the social network with an update to the long-forgotten feature. You can also format your text with headers, quotes or bullets. By having users enjoy creating Notes that look like blog posts, they will inevitably spend more time and work harder on creating quality content to share with their friends.

Starting today, Facebook is rolling out an update to make notes on Facebook more handsome and customizable. It is also purported that Facebook wants to rival Medium, a blogging platform established by Ev Williams, a Twitter co-founder.

Text formatting options are limited, but all of the essentials are there – heading, numbered and bulleted lists, pull quotes, and code blocks. Notes was expected to be a space for users to write down their thoughts, but the Facebook feature looked like it was not particularly serving that objective.

In August, Facebook did an experimental facelift of Notes with the aim to give the feature a sense of importance and permanence. Instead of the standard wall of plaintext that longform Facebook posts have traditionally eschewed, the additional formatting makes the entries much easier to read and digest. This experiment seems to have been a success.

On a sidenote, just a day before the Facebook Notes overhaul, Facebook also rebranded the free app offered by the Internet.org platform as “Free Basics”. It’s something that has been around for a while, and provides away to write longer posts, but for some reason it has been largely ignored by Facebook users. The company, however, did not go into detail if this may change in the near future.

Additionally, the image embedding process has been boosted with the ability to add captions, and even resize photos accordingly, to better fit the content.

The feature is available on web and desktop.