Wow--I definitely hadn't seen this before. Among Facebook's eerie new suggestions: that you go back through your old uploaded photographs and reminisce. (They call it "Photo Memories"...meaning, I guess, memories of photographs that themselves record memories?)
That's always been a function of the display album, of course. Sitting on your living room table or bookshelf, an album seems to demand occasional perusal. Now that your photographs are stored remotely, and albums have migrated from the parlor to the social portal (something I wrote about in Afterimage a couple of years ago), it would seem to be less of a possibility. Cue Facebook, which has programmed in the old suggestiveness of the album on the table--presumably to increase its own "stickiness" for commercial reasons.
While it's become trendy to vilify Facebook at the moment, this commercial cultivation of nostalgia is an old trick, especially in photographic circles, and it was always one of the selling points of photo albums. For someone who loves the whole idea of the photograph album, it's interesting to see its old functions conserved or repurposed in this new format.
(I can't resist including xkcd's take on Facebook's prodding suggestions...)
