A few people on Facebook — you included! — post these great historic updates, citing what happened on that day a few years ago. I know Facebook has an “on this day” feature, but how do I enable it?
Unusual for Facebook, the addition of the historic newsfeed filter “On This Day” wasn’t announced with great fanfare and a pop-up advert right in the middle of your newsfeed. In fact, if you don’t know how to get to it and allow it to add notifications to your stream, you’ll likely never have it up and running on your Facebook account.
And since it’s a time travel feature do I need to point out that if you weren’t actually on Facebook a year ago that it’s not going to offer up much for you anyway? I’ve been on the system for eons so there’s plenty for it to filter through from my historic posts, but if you’re new to the social media service, well, then you’ll enjoy On This Day next year, I suppose. 🙂
To start, there’s no link, no button. Your main screen looks like, well, its usual mix of options and links:
The trick? You need to go to a specific URL: facebook.com/onthisday
Click on that (or type it in yourself if you’re the suspicious type) and you’ll see something like this:
Quite festive with its tiny photo icons scattered along the top, isn’t it?
To enable the On This Day notifications, simply click the green Get Notifications button.
For me, it’s fun to see what was going on a year or more ago. For example, one year ago, here’s what I was sharing about Apollo 11:
Scroll down further and if you’ve been on Facebook for multiple years, it’ll even show posts from further back:
That’s all there is to it. Why it’s so hard to figure out where to find On This Day is beyond me, though.
Oh, and if you tire of it, go into Settings and you can find it to disable (or enable, I suppose):
Now in one hundred years will they have “In The Previous Century” on Facebook 2200?
Maybe. Just maybe.
We are now 2017 and still the option on this day is ,,”not availabke”
what kills me …. is that I used to have … then one day … it just stop showing up … says it is unavailable… how can it be unavailable when I use to have it ???
“Why it’s so hard to figure out where to find On This Day is beyond me, though.”
As Facebook says, it’s not available to everyone!
When I click on your link: http://cl.ly/0r1h2x1g1h15
When I go to notifications: http://cl.ly/2Y213r0D3b3Y
Same for me, I even msg to dave regarding the issue which he will never even look
Yaaniu, what happens if you go into Facebook, then bring up the Settings menu (top right), go to Notifications > On Facebook. Do you see a section for “On This Day”?
I tried this. No on this day section for me. Feature still not available 🙁
So how can it be available to every single person I’m am friends with (including those that only go on it once a month) yet here I am on Facebook multiple times a day yet never had it offer not able to get to because “sorry it’s not available to everyone”
I heard that if you didn’t sign up for the app during its test period, you won’t have access to it now. The test period is over. Going to the link mentioned above ( facebook.com/onthisday ) for those who don’t have the app doesn’t help.
Adding to the comment, perhaps I should have added that it not only say’s “Sorry, this feature isn’t available” (since that sound like it’s not available on Facebook anymore). Under that statement it adds the following — (my name), thanks for coming to check out your memories. Currently, this feature isn’t available to everyone. Since I consider myself an avid user of Facebook, and don’t have this option, I feel sure there are a number of other folks who don’t have “On This Day” either, and thus cannot figure out where you go to activate it. They probably haven’t been given the option to get it (thus the reason why they can’t find it).
J Madden I get the same message you do.
I also don’t have this yet..
One reason some folks may feel it’s hard to find this feature is because they haven’t been offered it. When friends started talking about it, I was so anxious to get it, as I like revisiting previous years, conversations, happenings, etc. I’m quite active on FB and have been since 2009. As of today, I still don’t have the options and receive the following when I click on the url you mentioned above. “Sorry, This Feature Isn’t Available”