There are plenty of ways to say thanks to a Facebook friend. A quick comment on their profile, a private message, or a ‘thanks for those three Candy Crush lives you sent me an hour ago but can I have three more now?’ request, for example.
Until now, there hasn’t been an easy way to thank them by creating and sharing an animated slideshow of your shared Facebook history, with perky background music. But fear not: the social network has your back with its new Say Thanks feature.
“Your friends are at the core of your Facebook experience, and we are always looking for new ways to help you celebrate those friendships,” explained the company in a blog post, which pitched the new feature as “personalised video cards”.
“Share a Say Thanks video with a close friend, your significant other, a relative, a coworker, an old friend – or anyone else in your life who you’d like to celebrate. There is no limit to how many personalized videos you can create and share.”
Fun times ahead for anyone with the kind of friends for whom there is no limit to how many BuzzFeed quizzes, Buddhist mantras and/or virals from far-right activist group Britain First they can share.
Say Thanks is at least easy to use: you choose a friend and a theme: Old Friends or Friends – sorry, no Schadenfreude-Supplying Former School Bully Who’s Fallen On Hard Times or Racist Colleague yet – as well as a combination of seven photos or posts, with an emphasis on those you both feature in.
Once finished, you can share it publicly, complete with a #saythanks hashtag and a link for the friend to reciprocate, or (as is more likely) make a video card for another older and/or better friend than you. It’s a brutal place, social networking.
Some Facebook users will adopt Say Thanks entirely seriously, enjoying the chance to relive shared moments with their friends and family.
The rest of us will relish its comic potential: among the top photo suggestions for my card to one colleague are a grillpan of sausages; a pot-bellied clown in an open-to-the-crotch jumpsuit; Mark Knopfler; and a passage from Jimmy Savile’s autobiography.
In fairness, that does cover the key pillars of our relationship, in the same way that Facebook’s “Look Back” personal retrospective correctly identified a photo of a dead mouse next to a hosepipe as a highlight from my first seven years on the social network. Algorithms are more fun when they’re slightly misfiring, in these situations.
Why is Facebook launching Say Thanks? It wants us to if not say thanks, certainly feel gratitude to the company for the way it’s become a platform for so many of our social interactions with friends and family members.
Our shared moments are buried in its archives, rather than in dusty photo albums or unreliable memories. Say Thanks is as much a celebration of Facebook’s databanks as of our friendships. Set to music, with sausages.
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