With more than 950 million users sharing content on Facebook, the social network has started a project aimed at highlighting some of the more extraordinary stories of its users (and celebrating the social network itself in the process).
'Facebook Stories' is both a standalone Web site, and dedicated Facebook page. According to Facebook, each month, the project will explore stories around a different theme.
“The first theme is 'Remembering' and includes the story of Mayank Sharma, a man from New Delhi who lost his memory after contracting meningitis. Sharma rediscovered his friend network with 'People You May Know' [tool] on Facebook, helping him to recover some of the experiences he lost,” says Facebook.
Sharma's story is told through a video that charts how he came to use Facebook as a tool to rebuild 27-years' worth of memories that he had lost.
Just a day after being rolled out, the Facebook Stories page already had more than 7 000 likes at the time of writing. The page also includes the story of a group of people who came together on Facebook to try and save a historic building in an area where there was no local press or means to get the message out.
“But the Petrie isn't getting any of that attention - not yet, at least, and it probably never will. It just has Knight's Facebook group, 'Save the Petrie Building,' and the few hundred members who share his passion for preserving this piece of Guelph's collective memory.”
Facebook has also partnered with The New Yorker to feature some of the magazine's best pieces from its archive, focused on memory. The selected pieces have been made available online for free.
This is not Facebook's first attempt at curating its users' stories. In 2010, the social network launched an app called 'Facebook Stories' through which users could submit their own stories. The app was killed in 2011, prior to Twitter launching its own 'Twitter Stories' project in November.
Twitter uses the platform to curate submissions about unique Twitter-related stories. “Each story reminds us of the humanity behind Tweets that make the world smaller,” said Twitter.
Together with the video and written stories, Facebook says it will also create an infographic every month, showing statistics from the social network based around that month's specific theme. The first infographic looks at which milestones and memories Facebook users share the most on their timelines.
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