Remember Facebook Notes? I didn’t. And based on the sparse number of friend-written Notes I found when I finally traversed my way to that long-forgotten corner of Facebook, not many of you do either. That makes reports of its recent overhaul a bit of a surprise. As it turns out, though, there’s ample reason for Facebook to gut renovate this particular ghost town.

For those in need of a quick refresher (which, again, I’m assuming is most of you!), Facebook Notes has seemingly existed as a vestige of an age when Facebook imposed strict character limits on its status updates. If that doesn’t sound familiar, it’s because you’ve had 60,000 characters to play with since November 2011. It’s been since March of 2009 that you’ve had a cap that could be characterized as anything close to restrictive. Here’s an illustrative graph that Facebook released in a post four years ago.

FacebookBack when a Facebook status update barely outweighed a tweet, it made sense for users to have a place to share their more involved thoughts, or as was more often the case at the time, their participation in the “25 Random Things You Didn’t Know About Me” survey that took over the site sometime in 2008. While listicled oversharing eventually followed werewolf RPGs into the Facebook graveyard, Notes lurked quietly in the background, a home for some of your more verbose and/or introspective friends to relive their LiveJournal glory days.As first spotted by developer and blog pioneer Dave Winer, though, Facebook has recently tried infusing new life into one of its most stale elements. “We’re testing an update to Notes to make it easier for people to create and read longer-form stories on Facebook Notes,” a Facebook spokesperson confirmed. For at least a few users right now, that means a makeover that’s both brand new and surprisingly familiar.Medium LargeTo get a sense of just how dramatically different the new Notes layouts looks compared to the old one, we might as well look at the before and after. Fortunately, my account is still saddled with the old format, which means that when I write a Note it ends up looking like this: FacebookIt’s not dissimilar from a regular status update, which helps explain why most people have spent the last four years just using status updates. Compare that, then to this example of what the new Notes format looks like, as in this example from John Biesnecker. FacebookMuch better! A broad, full-width cover image, more screen real estate, what appears to be a crisper, more readable font. A proper byline and timestamp give it a sense of permanence and importance. The whole thing feels less cramped, like you might want to sit here and type a while, as opposed to the previous format (or a regular status update), which feels like it just wants to get this whole reading thing over with.There are other improvements at work here as well. Facebook is testing new ways to tag people, resize photos, and add links and hashtags to Notes, while retaining the same privacy controls. In the new format, you can still share your note either with everyone, just friends, a hand-picked group of names, or just keep it to yourself.In all, the new Notes looks quite a bit like wunderkind blogging platform Medium, which may be because Notes and Medium appear to have been designed with input from the same design team. Teehan + Lax worked on both early prototypes of what would evolve into Medium as well as the final product. That same team announced they would be joining Facebook in January of this year. The similarities are striking enough to assume at least some of the same DNA.So yes, Notes looks far better for some users today than it did before. The bigger question, though, is why?Back to BlogNotes may just be a limited trial right now, but if and when it rolls out to the larger Facebook universe, it’ll help the company address a few core needs.“One of the things Facebook is doing is looking at where else people go,” says 451 Research analyst Alan Pelz-Sharpe. “And also, importantly, key demographics they’re not doing so well in.”Teenagers, by now famously, fall squarely in the latter category. As it turns out, teens are blogging.“Blogging’s one of those odd ones that seems to be trendy again. It was very popular seven, eight, nine years ago. People obviously did carry on blogging, but it sort of went away from the spotlight,” explains Pelz-Sharpe. “It’s actually getting very popular with teenagers again, who are going through that whole journaling move.”That longer-form writing is taking place on the usual suspects, like WordPress and Blogspot and Tumblr and, yes, Medium. But it’s also prevalent in the way teenagers use other popular platforms like Instagram (which, notably, Facebook also owns). Pelz-Sharpe notes—and this Fast Company report from June highlights as well—that high schoolers today use Instagram to stitch together narratives from their lives, rather than post one-off shots of their latest haircut, a digital-age sort of journaling that could hypothetically translate easily enough into the new image-friendly Notes format.Pushing its users toward long-form written content also, like posting stories from major news outlets as native Instant Articles, helps drive engagement. The longer people are writing and reading, the more time they’re spending in their News Feed and Facebook, and the less likely they are to be distracted by some other Internet experience. Readers are more likely to see Facebook ads, and Facebook gets even more insight into the writer.“It’s a lot richer data to mine as well,” says Pelz-Sharpe. “If you sit down to write a mini-essay, you’re sharing a lot of information there.”There’s plenty of potential upside for Facebook users, too. While posting a story to Medium or any other dedicated blog platform can be a fluid, rewarding experience, there’s little guarantee that anyone will actually see it. Or even, in many cases, that you would want them to. A Facebook Note, by contrast, gives you a potential built-in audience of all your friends and acquaintances, or at the very least the intersection of those with whom you choose to share and the News Feeds Facebook’s algorithms insert your work into.The flip side of this is that you also hypothetically limit your potential audience, unless or until Facebook builds in discovery tools (tags, which they are experimenting with, would be one way to do this). Fortunately, though, blogging platforms are not a zero-sum game. People already share their tweets and Instagrams directly to Facebook; there’s no reason they couldn’t cross-pollinate their Notes or Mediums with a simple copy/paste.Reinventing Notes certainly won’t make or break Facebook, especially not as long as it’s a limited trial on a feature few people remembered to begin with. That Facebook chose to invest in it at all rather than letting it wilt, though, if nothing else shows that blogging is back.Go Back to Top. 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