Facebook's New Ways to Dress Up Your Profile
What you need to know about the new features Facebook is adding.
— -- A short looping video showing off your personality could soon be the star of your Facebook profile.
Facebook is beginning tests today for new ways for users to dress up their profiles, including the addition of a profile video letting users "show a part of yourself you couldn’t before, and add a (literal!) new dimension to your profile," a newsroom post said.
Facebook product managers Aigerim Shorman and Tony Hsieh said user profiles are viewed more than 4 billion times per day, making them a crucial part of how a person expresses who they are online.
Along with the option for a fun looping video, the team at Facebook has also decided to focus on profile photos.
"Profile pictures are not just static portraits. They represent what’s going on in your life right now and what’s important to you, and we want to give people the tools to better express themselves in this way," Shorman and Hsieh wrote in a post.
Facebook will roll out the ability to set a temporary profile photo which can revert back to another at a specified time, making it even easier to support your team leading up to a game or to show support for an important cause.
"It can be a visual status update to let you friends know what’s going on in your life today, or it can be a moment of solidarity for a cause you feel strongly about," Shorman and Hsieh wrote.
The other big change includes improved profile controls, letting a user do as much or as little as they want with a customizable space at the top of their profile, which will have room for a one-line biography and as many as five featured photos. Mobile users can also expect a big design change with profile photos moving front and center, making more room for the new features, should they choose to include them.
While the word is officially out on the fancy new window dressings, Faceboook said they're currently only available to iPhone users in California and the United Kingdom and will be rolled out to more people soon.