Facebook's "How We Met" Feature and where it's gone…

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Yesterday evening, someone mentioned Facebook’s “how we met” feature to me. Remember it? When you added a new friend, Facebook would ask you how you knew that person… whether you lived together/met through a friend/”hooked up” like in the screengrab above. The feature was around in 2007 and probably started in 2006, if my memory serves me correctly, but has obviously disappeared in the years between then and now. Judging by Yahoo Questions, it seems like it got pulled somewhere between Jan and May 2009.

The fact that I didn’t notice its disappearance until now is probably one of the reasons Facebook decided to withdraw this feature. It was only used once, when you added somebody, then you never looked at it again. It was there when you skimmed a list of your friends… and in theory it built up useful information about your social network, but in practice people usually skipped the step or just wrote something ridiculous.

Starting off as a tick-box set of options, there was for a certain period of time the opportunity to add your own comments in a text box. You know, things like: “it was love at first sight” or “we both hated our medieval French teacher” or “I sat to him in Biology”. I always liked the trick option in the set of tick-boxes – if you said “I don’t know this person” then it would automatically cancel your friend request and tell you off for adding someone you didn’t know.

We’ve always known that Facebook add and withdraw features from time to time, but when its features that actually contain content and then that content disappears… it’s a shame.

One to add to the graveyard of dead features, along with being able to edit content on other people’s walls (a fun experience which got pulled fairly swiftly back in oo 2005).

Guess it’s just a little reminder of how much of our personal lives Facebook holds in its grasp and how easy it would be for them to start deleting other stuff – photos for example, not out of the question if the server space got a bit expensive. Of course we’d all notice that but equally there would be absolutely nothing we could do about it.

Any other Facebook memories..?

Anna Leach

One thought on “Facebook's "How We Met" Feature and where it's gone…”

  • This article is old, sure, but I’m reminded of losing this feature a lot. My best friend since wee tots, Matt, and I used this feature to improvise a constantly evolving and increasingly elaborate epic tale of how we met. It was the most brilliant collaborative piece of fiction we’d ever come up with (and that’s saying a lot) involving (if I can remember) panhandling, social uprising, acts of extreme kindness and violence, puzzles, revenge plots, assassination attempts, and dozens of really really innocuous and random things.

    It was all lost one day randomly, and we still grieve.

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