Facebook today announced an update coming to its iOS and Android mobile apps, as well as its main website, that is aimed to make birthdays more `meaningful` for users based in the United States.
Two weeks ahead of your birthday, Facebook said it will now send you a message in your News Feed with the option of creating a fundraiser. If you opt-in, you can choose from any of the 750,000 U.S. nonprofit organizations on Facebook and set a funding goal. Then on your actual birthday, all of your friends will get the usual notification to send you a happy birthday message, which will also include a prompt to donate to your organization of choice.
Facebook said the update is a way to streamline a popular birthday tradition, which sees people dedicating the day to a specific cause instead of asking for gifts of their own.
People often dedicate their birthday to support a cause, and we´ve seen people using Facebook to raise money for causes they care about. For those in the US, we´re now making it easier to do this by giving you the opportunity to create a fundraiser for your birthday directly on Facebook.
Birthdays have always been a part of Facebook, and we hope to continue providing you with a variety of experiences that make celebrating on the platform fun and meaningful for you and your friends. The company has supported user-generated fundraisers in the past, earlier this year allowing each Facebook user to create fundraisers for six specific categories: education, medical, pet medical, crisis relief, personal emergency, and funeral and loss. With those fundraisers, and presumably the new birthday-focused fundraisers, users were able to make a donation to the cause directly within the Facebook app.
The birthday announcement also included a new celebratory video that will appear whenever a birthday of a close friend is coming up. Similar to the social network`s previous anniversary videos, it combines pictures and status updates tha ...
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