Your profile picture on the web is certainly one of the most seen pictures out of your entire uploaded pictures. Facebook sees this opportunity, and gives users the ability to upload a 7-second profile picture, just to keep its social network more alive.
Animated visuals can be addicting to see, and they are certainly more attractive than just plain static pictures. With animated profile picture, Facebook wants to make it the center of users' web presence on its platform.
According to Facebook, profile pictures are aimed to represent what's going on in people's lives, and by making them animated, users can make their pictures in more expressive ways. Since posts from users may not be describing users' identity as good as biographical info or photos, animated profile pictures will make push users' representation above the timeline.
Facebook has been pushing video content for quite some time, and animated profile picture feature is a good reason to make users keep on uploading videos and familiarize themselves with the process if they haven't done so before.
And by putting biographical info more at the front and center, users can update their friends better with what's going on, and this is critical to Facebook's method of targeting ads.
An overhaul on Facebook's profile pages back in 2010 has made users put more info about where they live and where they went to school and work. Since then, biographical has fueled Facebook's targeting ads.
To use the feature, you can click on your profile picture to upload a new profile video. By tapping the record button, you can shoot a looping video for up to 7 seconds without sound. The video will then autoplay without sound, unless clicked.
Besides animated profile picture, Facebook is also introducing some big changes to users' profile pages. Viewed about 4 billion times a day, users can now 'enhance' their profile by pinning Featured Photos to the top of the profile, creating temporary profile pics, easier visibility controls for About info, a new 100-character Bio field, and a mobile-first design.
Featured Photos are photos that will appear pinned to a section on top of your profile. What makes Featured Photos different than regular photos is that they can show better clue about your identity to others, for example to those you've just met and what them to become your Facebook friends.
As for Temporary Profile Pictures, Facebook has been testing it for a few weeks before officially launching it. The feature allows users to select a profile pic like usual, but have the ability to revert it back to their old pic after a set time. This can be useful for promoting something. Facebook is even providing tools for filtering your profile pic.
With user's profile picture more centered and visible, Facebook is also adding a privacy control to the About information fields. Users that set this to public can make it appear on the profile pic just below their profile picture, rather than in the About section. Users can now describe themselves better with a new 100-character Bio field.
What Facebook did is to highlight more of its mobile-first ability. At first glance, the little changes are indeed aesthetic, aimed for pleasing users. However, the changes can be significant to Facebook because they're centered on its core features. This is seen as a smart way Facebook has managed to align its business with its user experience.
By making the Profile pages more appealing, more people are expected to visit the pages. This in turn will make users update more about themselves, making Facebook able to serve even better targeted ads to them.
Facebook is rolling these features out slowly, starting from a small groups of users in California and the U.K. before pushing the them out to more places.
