So who did it better? Google Year-in-Review, or Facebook Lookback?
Facebook is lousy with Lookback videos this week. To celebrate its 10th birthday, the social network put together (without asking, to the dismay of some) a retrospective of your life on Facebook from the moment you joined.
It starts by reminding you what year you joined. (For me, that was March 2007.) Then your first moments on Faceook. Your most liked posts. And then, about a minute later, it closes with (what else) a thumbs up.
Google, for its part, in December did a sort of Google+ Year-in-Review, pulling together photos and video that you’d uploaded. You might not have shared them, but if they’re in the system (and this is a reminder of how much gets sucked in through auto-backup), chances are you’ll see something from the year gone by that you’d forgotten all about.
So which did a better job? Facebook Lookback? Or Google’s Year-in-Review? We’ll take a look, using my videos as examples.
(If you want to creep on other folks’ public Lookback videos, you can do so with this link.)
Facebook Lookback
For its part, Facebook did a pretty nice job for my Lookback video. I don’t really remember making those first posts, but, sure enough, I had a 17-month old daughter, already beginning to raise hell. No real complaints from me on the content of the video.
Sharing, though, was another matter. For some reason I didn’t get a share button for a while. (And apparently I wasn’t alone.) That changed, and so soon I could pollute my friends’ timelines as well. But what if I want to share somewhere else? I can’t seem to find a way to properly download my Facebook Lookback. There are websites out there that help facilitate it, but no big “Download!” button. I found code to embed it here, but, again, Facebook doesn’t provide that.
(To embed video like we did here, use the following string of code, subbing in your unique video ID for the xxx: <iframe src=”https://www.facebook.com/video/embed?video_id=XXX” width=”720″ height=”1280″ frameborder=”0″></iframe>)
All in all, not horrible — but Facebook doesn’t care about sharing video anywhere but on Facebook. And if you have kids, they’ll dominate your Lookback. Not necessarily a bad thing, I guess.
Google+ year-end review
This pretty much speaks for itself. Another good look back — and I love how it includes video along with the still pictures. And becuase it’s Google doing the heavy lifting, we get proper sharing through YouTube. You have to save it from Google+ and then re-upload — ridiculous, but easy enough — and then share wherever you want.
So what do you think? Did Faceook do a better job with Lookback than Google with its Year-in-Review?