Facebook’s experimental makeover of Notes, the features that lets you write nicely-formatted long posts, was apparently a success. Now the social network is making its redesign official, Facebook revealed Friday. The refreshed version of Notes is available to everyone.
Facebook has largely ignored Notes for years; the last major update was in 2010 — but as Facebook increasingly builds out its publishing features for media outlets, it makes sense to encourage its 1.25 billion users to think of the social network as a place for their own blog posts as well.
Seemingly looking to take on the likes of Medium and Blogger, Facebook Notes has been treated to a facelift that makes posts more attractive and introduces new customization options. While Notes used to be (understandably, to some extent) all about the text, now graphics and formatting are given greater prominence.
Just like your Facebook profile, Notes can now feature a cover photo at the top and a minimalist editor is on hand to help beautify your posts. In addition to the cover photo, the update means your post can be littered with any other images you want to include, and you can resize them from within the mini CMS so there’s no need to fire up an image editor.
Text formatting options are limited, but all of the essentials are there — heading, numbered and bulleted lists, pull quotes, and code blocks. As before, the Notes you create can be made public, private, or shared with a limited group of people.
If you’re yet to try out Facebook Notes, there’s never been a better time to do so — this could be the start of something new for the social network.
