Facebook announced that starting today, the timeline is now available everywhere. This is the new profile design that encourages Facebook users to add as many events about their lives as they like. Essentially, Facebook wants you to put your entire life online. You can update things that happened all the way back to your birth.
When announcing the feature back in September, Mark Zuckerberg actually said, “Tell the whole story of your life on a single page.”
Will you put your entire life on Facebook? Let us know in the comments.
“When you upgrade to timeline, you’ll have seven days to review everything that appears on your timeline before anyone else can see it,” says Facebook’s Paul McDonald. “You can also choose to publish your timeline at any time during the review period. If you decide to wait, your timeline will go live automatically after seven days. Your new timeline will replace your profile, but all your stories and photos will still be there.”
“If you want to see how your timeline appears to other people, click the gear menu at the top of your timeline, and select ‘View As.’ You can choose to see how your timeline appears to a specific friend or the public,” he explains.
Keep in mind, Facebook populates it for you at first, with the information you’ve already shared. When you’re reviewing it, you can choose things you want to feature, remove or hide.
You can feature something on your timeline by rolling over the story and clicking the star to expand it to two columns. Alternatively, you can click the pencil icon to hide, delete or edit it.
There is also a privacy dropdown, where you can adjust who sees what. This will be an important feature to keep in mind, but frankly might mean a whole lot of thinking and work on your part, if you care a lot about this kind of thing. If you have a lot of friends, you’re going to have to consider which of them you really want to see what.
It doesn’t sound like a whole lot of fun, but at least Facebook is giving you this control. They sure don’t want to be in any more hot water over privacy with users, and especially regulators. They already have a lot of new stipulations in that department, courtesy of the Federal Trade Commission.
As we walked through in a previous article on the topic, there are a lot of different kinds of events you can add to the timeline.
You can add health-related events:
Other life events:
You can add content about when you lose a loved one:
The point is, you can pretty much add anything from your life starting with birth, which means a lot of people are going to be spending a whole lot of time adding things from their lives. Or at least that appears to be Facebook’s goal.
To get the timeline today, go to this page and click “get it now”. Eventually, you’ll see an announcement at the top of your profile, and have it anyway.
The timeline will also be available on Android and m.facebook.com starting today. It’s interesting that Facebook is going Android before iOS on this one, considering that they usually launch on iPhone first. They only just launched the new Android app in the last week – quite a while after its iOS counterpart.
The timeline is probably the most significant feature Facebook has launched in quite a while. Do you think the feature will ultimately be good for the web? For users? Is this a good idea? Tell us what you think.