“Timeline is the story of your life”: this was roughly Mark Zuckerberg’s statement when presenting the new Facebook features during the F8 conference held a few hours ago in New York.
It changes how personal information is displayed on Facebook, but more importantly, it changes the concept of how one’s presence on Facebook is framed from now on. In practice, it’s as if your profile were no longer just a stream of status updates, photos, location check-ins, and pages.
With Timeline, everything becomes a true “reasoned” and rational chronological history of interconnections, places you’ve been, people you’ve met, workplaces, educational institutions, etc…
Timeline is a modern personal diary, it’s a virtual civil registry card, as well as a source of information strictly related to Facebook usage: for example, you can easily find out the exact date you joined the social network or when and with whom you became friends.
In short, it’s the end of the simple status update and the beginning of a new phase: putting your social life on display, even presenting it graphically in a different way.
The layout has indeed changed in parallel: no longer a static and almost sterile page but something that resembles a much more “evolved” blog. Immediately below the header, you can insert a representative photo, and further down, you can arrange the information you wish to share with contacts or externally, organizing it into “blocks”.
To further enrich the new Facebook features related to personal profiles, three new buttons will also be added: alongside the classic “Like“, there will be “Seen“, “Read“, and “Listened“. This is a way to let others know even more about what you’ve done to find new “social harmonies”.
In reality, it’s not yet very clear how these buttons can be fully utilized, although the launch of Facebook Music – the ability to subscribe to listen to and post all the music you want from the catalog – suggests that Facebook’s multimedia project will gain considerable traction precisely from these new buttons.
Another new feature is the appearance of a ticker that shows everything your friends are doing in real-time. However, this particular aspect has drawn some protests, always concerning privacy, which in this way would not be entirely guaranteed, according to users who prefer a more private profile on Facebook.
It is always possible to adjust personal settings to modulate the level of privacy you prefer to maintain on Facebook, however, at least initially, it will take time to get used to the new graphics and the many novelties.
The timeline is already starting to appear on US profiles, but changes are also beginning to be seen in Italy, mostly by those who have accessed the page facebook.com/about/timeline, explicitly requesting its activation.
Here is the official presentation video of the Facebook Timeline.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=hzPEPfJHfKU
Pubblicato in Social Media
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