Facebook users have created 'hundreds of millions' of Look Back videos

If you feel like your Facebook news feed is flooded with Look back videos, there’s a simple explanation for that. It is.

The ’look back’ initiative was released by Facebook  as part of its tenth year ‘celebrations’.  It is essentially a one minute glimpse (complete with emotional piano score) into your first ‘moments’ on the social networking site as well as your most popular status updates and photographs.

And given that social media and Facebook is essentially a celebration of the individual, the videos have been welcomed with open arms. A couple of hundred million of them in fact. That’s right. Facebook has confirmed that ‘hundreds of millions’ of the videos have been made, although it declined to give an exact figure. So don’t expect the deluge of ‘“Here’s my Facebook movie. Find yours at https://facebook.com/lookback/ ‪#‎FacebookIs10’ that’s all over your newsfeed to stop anytime soon.

The company said that the videos would be available for about a month. And if you want to keep your video forever, then you need to share it. And why not. What’s one more ‘Lookback’ video among the hundreds of millions of videos that are invading News feeds everywhere?

As far as initiatives go, this has proved to be insanely popular. Too bad Facebook didn’t bung a few ads on to those videos. That could have easily made them a few more billions of dollars. But Facebook seems to have found a winning formula in combining nostalgia and narcissism. The next one probably won’t come free.