It seems Facebook engineers understand the heaviness of a breakup and its come up with a tool to make breakups easier on its users. The world’s largest social media network is trying to ease heartbreak and curb feelings after a nasty (or maybe not so nasty) breakup.
Facebook has been a place for sharing life’s most important moments for some time. When you get a new job, you post it to Facebook, get married, it’s on Facebook. The same goes for having children, going to a reunion, planning a party. You share some of your most special moments with your network of friends on Facebook. Sometimes those moments aren’t so happy though. Sometimes those moments include things like divorce and breakups, but the Facebook team has made even those hard moments easier for its users.
Often times, when a relationship ends, it can be emotionally exhausting. If the relationship was “Facebook official,” it can be doubly exhausting, so the social media company has decided to launch a new tool to make the emotional breakup a bit easier. Facebook is testing its new tool on mobile apps in the United States. If the test run goes well here, the company will likely offer the tool to its 1.5 billion users worldwide.
Essentially, the new tool will allow users to stop seeing posts, photos and videos from their ex-lover. Many people end up blocking their exes. However, the new tool will make the harshness of blocking the person unnecessary. You simply just don’t have to see their posts unless you choose to.
Once a person’s Facebook relationship status is changed on the website, they will be able to use this tool which also allows for the removal of any links that connected them to the person in the past.
The company’s push for the breakup tool makes sense though. If there is something that may upset someone on a website or social media, they are more likely to avoid the site and, if people are avoiding the website or the app, the company is losing an opportunity to make valuable revenue.
Facebook collects information based on your likes and dislikes and show ads based on their preferences. They receive money from these ads, so the more daily users the social media site can have, the better!
“This work is part of our ongoing effort to develop resources for people who may be going through difficult moments in their lives,” Facebook product manager Kelly Winters wrote in a blog post.
Winters’ blog post, and the company’s move to offer breakup help, is another reminder to how ingrained social media, and especially Facebook, has become in our lives.
The Menlo Park-based company has more than 1 billion daily users worldwide and those who have the app on their phone tend to visit Facebook more than once a day. The keep-the-users-happy goal of the company seems to be working.
CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg has turned the social media site into a huge success since he founded the social media service a decade ago in his Harvard dorm room. The company’s value now sits at a pretty $300 billion.