Your profile picture is the message you send most. There’s no easier, more ubiquitous way to raise awareness for a cause then splashing your pic rainbow for gay rights or green to promote the Arab Spring.
Now Facebook is giving people a tool to leverage this tiny
billboard. With its new Temporary Profile Picture feature that’s slated
for a broader rollout, you can change your pic but have it revert to
your old one after a set number of hours, days or weeks.
While it could prevent stale memes from squatting in
people’s profile pics, the feature could also encourage pics that don’t
show people’s faces, making them harder to identify at a glance. You can
argue it’s a shallow way to support a cause, but it’s better than total
apathy. Still, people who really want to make a difference might
consider sharing links to donate time or money to related charities
instead of just this clicktivism.
I received a report of the feature from one of TechCrunch’s readers (thanks Suki B aka @ForkToPen), and when asked to confirm the sightings,
Facebook admitted it’s testing the feature with a small number of
users, and hopes to roll it out more broadly in the coming months.
Unfortunately we don’t have an image of the actual expiration selector right now, but the company explains:
“We often see people use their profile pictures to support
a cause, root for a team, and commemorate milestones like birthdays and
anniversaries. Today, we’re testing a new feature that allows you to
set a temporary profile picture for a specified period of time.
Temporary profile pictures make it easier to to express who you are and
how you’re feeling at a given moment, without having to worry about
changing your profile picture back later.”
Those with the feature will see the option to set an
expiration date when they select a new profile picture. When the
expiration date hits, their profile pic reverts back to their old one
without publishing a News Feed story announcing the change. Their
temporary one will still be visible in their album of profile pics.
Facebook is wise to inform its product roadmap with the emergent behaviors of its users. At least 26 million
users turned their profiles rainbow to suppor the right to gay
marriage. In some ways, the feature could help prevent awkward
situations where people end up with a profile photo related to a passed
campaign or expired meme.
But the feature also has the potential to make Facebook
tougher to use. Profile pictures appear all over the app, and being able
to quickly recognize a friend from their familiar headshot makes the
app less cognitively taxing. If everyone uses temporary profile pics
that don’t show their faces, it makes their friends’ feeds feel more
foreign, and it forces them to read their name to know who they are.
It’s a double-edged sword, but Facebook clearly thinks it will make the social network more current than chaotic.