Happy Birthday! We hope you like the present we got you: yet another awful way for your friends to insincerely spam you through social media on this, your special day.
Not content with already devaluing the phrase through automatic SMS prompts that let a friend post “Happy Birthday!” simply by sending a single-character reply, Facebook now wants you to record videos of yourself half-heartedly sending birthday wishes.
The new feature, dubbed “birthday cam”, is launching first on iOS. It kicks in as you’re about to post on a friend’s wall on their birthday, and puts a small banner below the text entry box suggesting instead that you record a birthday video.
The videos, which can be up to 15 seconds long and adorned with special birthday frames, then get posted on the recipient’s wall. Surprisingly, Facebook doesn’t do anything interesting with the videos – there’s no “friendship day”-style montage, or anything. The videos are just dumped on the recipient’s feed one at a time, to be watched (or ignored) individually.
Birthday cam might make birthdays on social media fun again. Or it might be the latest volley in Facebook’s ongoing effort to devalue the entirety of human interaction rendering us all little more than like-clicking index fingers hooked up to eyeballs for reading adverts. Who knows? Anyway, happy birthday!
