Facebook’s ‘On This Day’ Feature Is A Time Capsule Into Your Illustrious Past

As Facebook ages, it’s becoming a journal of its users’ lives. Scroll through the Timeline and you’ll see the high and low points of a person’s life: people met, people lost, graduations, jobs, marriages and the other milestones and memories are documented on Facebook. Now, Facebook is rolling out a new feature that gives users a chance to reflect on some of those memories: On This Day. 


Facbooke wants you to check out your old posts with OnThisDay.
Image credit: Facebook

OnThisDay works much like you’d expect: each day, the feature gives you a look at what you were doing on this particular day in years past. It pulls status updates, photos, and other content you’ve shared into a little package that you can view on a browser or your phone’s Facebook app.

Of course, you may well end up finding some posts that you would just as soon not have on your Timeline, so Facebook lets you delete them as you see fit. Depending on what you posted, some OnThisDays are going to be much more interesting than others, but you won’t need to check each day to see which ones are worthwhile – Facebook will include an alert system you can customize.

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By default, the OnThisDay feature is only visible to you, but you can share individual OnThisDays with friends. Facebook says that it will roll out the service “globally,” but hasn’t set a specific date for the feature to appear, nor has it indicated which regions will receive OnThisDay first.
Joshua Gulick

Joshua Gulick

Josh cut his teeth (and hands) on his first PC upgrade in 2000 and was instantly hooked on all things tech. He took a degree in English and tech writing with him to Computer Power User Magazine and spent years reviewing high-end workstations and gaming systems, processors, motherboards, memory and video cards. His enthusiasm for PC hardware also made him a natural fit for covering the burgeoning modding community, and he wrote CPU’s “Mad Reader Mod” cover stories from the series’ inception until becoming the publication editor for Smart Computing Magazine.  A few years ago, he returned to his first love, reviewing smoking-hot PCs and components, for HotHardware. When he’s not agonizing over benchmark scores, Josh is either running (very slowly) or spending time with family.