Facebook's experimental makeover of Notes, the features that lets you write nicely-formatted long posts, was apparently a success.
Now the social network is making its redesign official, Facebook revealed Friday. The refreshed version of Notes is available to everyone.
The company has largely ignored Notes for years; the last major update was in 2010 -- but as Facebook increasingly builds out its publishing features for media outlets, it makes sense to encourage its 1.25 billion users to think of the social network as a place for their own blog posts as well.
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Though Notes is still relatively bare-bones, the update brings some much-needed customization features to the feature. Users now have access to a set of basic text formatting tools -- like headers, block quotes and bulleted and numbered lists -- and can add cover images to each note.
You can also bold, underline and italicize text via keyboard shortcuts, though there are no built-in buttons offered for those features.
Some of these formatting options, and the ability to embed photos, were available in previous versions of Notes. But the redesign makes the feature much more elegant. With a new font and more visually appealing layout, Notes now look more like blog posts than extended status updates.
As we noted when Facebook first began experimenting with the new look, the change also makes Facebook loos a lot more like Medium, the blogging startup created by Twitter cofounder Ev Williams.
You can check out the new Notes on Facebook's website and apps now. Unfortunately, note creation is limited to the web at the moment. Facebook didn't say whether this may eventually change.