Facebook Friends Day: Facebook makes customised videos of you and your friends to celebrate its 12th birthday

Users can edit which pictures appear in the video, in case any not-so-fond memories pop up

A Facebook user tries out the site's new 'Reactions' feature (GERARD JULIEN/AFP/Getty Images)

Facebook is celebrating its 12th birthday by creating customised videos of users and their friends over the years.

In honour of 'Friends Day', the videos "stitch together special moments" of friends into a short film that users can choose to share to their timelines.

Significantly, users can also edit which pictures appear in the video, in case they need to omit photos of not-so-fond memories that may have been included by accident.

Users can watch, share and edit their automatic Friends Day videos (Facebook)

The social network also released some new sticker packs in recognition of Friends Day, but they also announced an interesting statistic - there are now only 3.57 degrees of separation between any two given Facebook users, compared to 3.74 in 2011.

Facebook also said that in the last five years, the global number of users has more than doubled. The social network currently has just under 1.6 billion active users - that's not too far from a fifth of the entire world population.

The 'Friends Day' video may pop up at the top of your feed the next time you log in, or it may appear as an alert in your notifications tab. Some users say they haven't got it yet, but it should reach everyone by the end of the day.

The social network started life on 4 February 2004 as 'Thefacebook', originally a closed network open only to students of Harvard College.

Later it expanded to other Ivy League colleges, eventually opening up to universities across the US later in the year.

In 2006, Facebook became available to everyone (as long as they were over 13 and had an email address), and the company has grown enormously since. Based on current share prices, Facebook is now worth around $328 billion (£224 billion).