Facebook Timeline – Your Guide

If you have not heard the news. You will see a major change on Facebook here in the short future.

Timeline was announced last week on Thursday (Sept. 22nd) at f8 – Facebook’s developers conference.

This is a completely new way of looking at your profile page. Instead of just a clump of information (which is still readily available) it will now be organized by when it occurred… going all the way back to the day you were born.

I would like to give you a breakdown of the changes coming your way.

Here is the future edition of the Facebook profile page:

— The breakdown —

1 – New ‘banner’ image: This will not replace your profile picture (that image is still there, see it? lower-left of the banner) but will be seen only when someone comes to your profile specifically. You may change it to any image you like, whenever you like.

 

 

2 – Your basic info (just as before) has now moved to this location.

Directly underneath is now where you can tag your location, add a photo, share a link, add a major life event, (like getting married, getting a new job, overcoming a major illness, getting a pet/car/house etc.) or… update your status (how old school!)

 

 

 

3 – Here is where any of your apps will be listed. Starting with your friends and your photos but moving into other social mediums (that you may edit as you please) including Hulu, Spotify, and other music, video, photo, and game mediums.

 

4 – View Activity: Here you can go back and look (and sometimes edit) at every post… ever made… by you… or anyone else on Facebook… and decide whether or not you want it up on the timeline. (time-consuming… but also a bit fun to go back and see what you said ‘back in the day’)

5 – Update Info: This will take you to all the info you had before. Quotes, ‘about me’ jobs, schools, etc. It looks much more like a resume than it did before. You will be spending some time here as well updating your information.

 

6 – Your time machine (sans the flux capacitor): Ready to go back to any point in your life history? Now you can go back to the day you were born (and add photos!) if you like.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

7 – The timeline: Notice the line down the middle of the page. Notice how each event has an arrow pointing to that line. This is your timeline.

Here is every event ever listed… ever. Status updates, comments, photos, events… everything. As you scroll down you will go further back in time. Once you reach months in the past (and eventually years) Facebook will start summing up larger chunks of time by highlighting some of the most commented or liked events. Of course, you can easily click on a little icon above the months (or years) and see EVERYTHING that happened.

 

 

 

 

 

8 – Side note: Here is an example of the new streaming video integration. Now, when watching Hulu, you can update your status at any moment during your viewing and share that moment on Facebook. This will (eventually) work with Netflix and other streaming sites as well as most major music apps.

 

 

 

 

 

— End of the Breakdown —

I hope you enjoyed “the breakdown.” If you are interested you may easily jump onto the beta testing for ‘timeline’ now. Here is a handy guide.

What is your opinion of Facebook’s new ‘Timeline?’ What good things do you think will come out of it? What concerns do you have?

Until next time!

– M@