Today at the F8 Facebook conference, Mark Zuckerburg announced the next evolution of the social network with Timeline. Timeline is a replacement to your existing Facebook profile page, which is designed to be the story of your life on one page. As Zuckerberg puts it: All your stories, all your apps, and a new way to express who you are.
With the Timeline, you can go back to different years of your life and add photos and events from the past to help build a more complete profile of your life. As many people have already mentioned, think of it as a online scrapbook.
This, along with the other recent changes such as pubic sharing and subscribe features, is a clear indication that Facebook wants to be your online identity. Not just to the people you add as friends, but to the internet as a whole.
There’s no secret as to why this is beneficial to Facebook. The more info of yourself you are willing to share on Facebook, the more information Facebook can sell to advertisers or provide to developers.
Now there are already a bunch of Facebook haters (mainly on Google+) that are already panning the new Timeline update, saying it’s too busy and reminds them of MySpace. However I do think it’s laid out quite nicely. I’m just not sure how useful the Timeline feature will be.
I spend the majority on my time on Facebook within the news feed. I rarely spend any time in my profile let alone other people’s profiles. The only time I visit anyone’s profile is to view old photos, which is done pretty effectively in the existing photos albums interface. For the most part, I use my social networks for keeping up with my present life, not looking back to the past.
There is also the issue of whether people are willing to share anymore information with Facebook. A lot of people I know, even those who are not technically inclined, are choosing to share less details and lock down their profiles to limit visibility to anyone who isn’t a friend. Many see Facebook as a private communication tool between their friends not the public identity service the company wants to be.
This extends to the negative opinion that Facebook has with many of it’s customers. With all the unwanted changes to it’s system and continuing privacy issues, many Facebook users actually hate the company; but feel like they have no other choice but to use it since that’s where all their friends communicate. In short, people don’t trust Facebook.
Timeline is a nice addition to Facebook for those who want to invest the time into their profile, but it’s far from the game changer that certain bloggers have claimed. For a lot of people the addition of the Timeline profile page will not change the way they use the service. Given the outrage with the other recent changes to the news feed, I know those users are breathing a sigh of relief.