​Facebook rolls out refreshed Notes to get users blogging

Facebook has rolled out a spruced up version of its long neglected Notes feature with new tools to add images, resize photos and format layout.

With the refreshed feature Facebook wants more of its billion users to begin blogging, and has provided a few more features and slicker design to better compete with long-form platform Medium from Twitter co-founder Ev Williams.

The updated Notes will allow users to add a cover photo and images in the story body, as well as options to add a caption to a photo and resize them. There are now three different header types and text can be organised into quotes or bullets.

There are still a few curious omissions in the update that keep Notes buried compared to the standard Timeline update.

"You'll be able to create these new notes on the web, and they're fully viewable on mobile," Facebook said in its update announcement. In other words, Notes still can only be added from a desktop and can't be created or edited from Facebook's iOS and Android apps yet, where it's still buried in the About section of a user's profile.

If the revamp suggests Facebook is taking Notes seriously, presumably it would extend the features to its app at some point in future, given the fact that the vast majority of its nearly 1.5 billion users are on mobile these days.

The official update follows some users in August discovering that Facebook testing new editing features, with its design drawing comparisons to Medium. Facebook told The Next Web at the time that it wanted to make it easier for people to create and read longer-form stories on Facebook.

Much like a normal post, Facebook users can choose to share their Notes with friends or just family or simply keep it hidden as a draft.

You can see the difference between the new and old Notes below.

Notably, however, Mark Zuckerberg hasn't used Notes since 2009 but could make the feature well known if he published his next announcement there rather than his Timeline.