Before yesterday, I was barely even aware of Facebook Timeline. All I knew was that a couple of my Facebook friends suddenly had strikingly different Profile pages, and, at first glance, I hated them. I found their Profile pages confusing and cluttered and not very intuitive. I didn’t really know what I was looking at. The double column in the middle with staggered content particularly bugged me. I didn’t know where to look and I didn’t know what came before what or what any of it was. I actually felt personally affronted by these new Profile pages. They seemed needlessly elaborate and it made finding the information I was looking for more difficult. I blamed the people who had made these changes and made their Profile pages so pointlessly complicated.

This week, however, I did a bit of research, and I found out that this new Profile page layout was coming directly from Facebook. And even though the Timeline is just one feature of the new layout (it is essentially a souped-up version of the old “Wall”), this whole new thing is being called Timeline. Personally, I find that confusing. It’s confusing because it really isn’t Timeline. It’s your Profile page that’s changing. The Profile page is getting a new layout and Timeline is just one new feature added to this layout. It’s not the whole thing. In fact, you can go to someone’s Profile page and look at their Photos, Friends, the About page, etc. and you won’t even see the Timeline. More confusing, once you click on Photos or anything else, there is no menu item anywhere to lead you back to anything called Timeline. In all its marketing, Facebook has called this big change “Timeline”, and yet when you are in the Profile page, there is no menu item or button anywhere to click on that says Timeline. Timeline itself shows up only when you go to your main Profile page. Essentially, to go to Timeline, you have to click on Profile. And Facebook wonders why people get confused…

In my reading, I also found out that EVERYONE will eventually have to change over to this new layout. We don’t have a choice in the matter. Facebook is bringing it out in stages, and you have the option to switch voluntarily to the new layout right away. If you don’t, they will switch it over for you eventually. You can’t keep the old layout. If you don’t voluntarily make the switch, you’ll wake up one morning (you can’t know when) and find out that the switch has been made for you.

My recommendation is to make the switch now and get used to it. Here’s why: Switching over to the new layout is a 2-stage process. First, you have to activate it. You click on the “Get Timeline” button to do that. Now, you will see the new Timeline Profile page layout, but no one else will. All your Facebook friends will still see the old layout. Then you have 7 days in which to go over the new Timeline layout and make all the changes you want – add pictures, delete posts and pictures, update Profile information, and adjust privacy and security settings. When you are happy with how it looks, you then click on “Publish Now.” Your new Timeline Profile page will go live and everyone will be able to see it at that point. And you can’t go back. Your old Profile page and the friendly Wall will be gone forever. As I said, you have 7 days in which to make everything perfect. At the end of those 7 days, if you haven’t clicked on “Publish Now” yet, then it will just happen automatically.

I think it’s a good idea to take advantage of these 7 days. For one thing, the new Timeline feature contains your ENTIRE Facebook life going all the way back to the very first day you signed up for your Facebook account. Think about that. Every single status update, comment, link, Like, relationship change, job change, etc. will suddenly be visible in a long seemingly endless line going down and down the page. People will be able to go back into your history and click on any year or month and see everything that took place in your Facebook world during that time. Everything you ever did in your Facebook universe has been stored in the servers at Facebook and with Timeline, it will all be there and visible. For some people who have gone through some dramatic changes in their life in the last few years, it can come as quite a shock. It might be a shock for you to suddenly see your own life laid out like that. You might not want other people to see it either. It can bring up good memories, but it can bring up bad ones, too. There might be things in there you’d rather forget (and have everyone else forget), so you can use those 7 days to delete and hide things and adjust the controls to show only what you want.

Also, the way Facebook works now, whenever you change something in your Profile, it sends a notice out to the world. Change your relationship status, for example, and an announcement goes out to everyone’s News Feed. Change a dozen things, and a dozen announcements go out. However, during the 7-day grace period, this doesn’t happen. And I like that. So you’ll be able to go over your entire Profile and change dozens of things all at once without bombarding the News Feeds with announcements. People will see the new Profile page all at once when you click on “Publish Now”. They won’t see a News Feed item for every single change you make. So it’s better to make all the changes now instead of later.

I’ve learned a lot about the way the new Profile page and Timeline work, but I’m not going to go into that right now. I’ll do that (Tips and Tricks) in the next post. For now, I’d just like to add one or two other observations to make it clear what this Timeline thing is all about. It might help people come to grips with it and lessen the confusion.

Essentially, two things have happened. One, the Profile page has been given a new design and layout. Things have been moved around and made to look different. In the old layout, for example, “Photos” was in a tiny list on the left hand side. In the new layout, it is in a large separate box right in the middle. Same thing for “Friends.” The items that were on the old Profile page are still there for the most part. They are just in different locations and look different. As part of this new design, you have the option of having a large Cover photo at the very top. This Cover photo takes up a good chunk of the page. Note, however, that this is optional. You don’t have to have a Cover photo if you don’t want to. Leave it empty, and the whole Profile page just moves up and fills that space.

Is this new design a good or bad thing? That’s up for debate. It essentially makes your Profile page look more like a personal blog or an old MySpace page. It seems to be much more about displaying YOU and your life as opposed to being about your friends interacting with you.

To be honest, the purpose of the Profile page and the Wall has always been ambiguous. The original concept was essentially to mimic a bulletin board or the wall of a building, where people can post messages for you, like it was graffiti. You go to your Wall and see if anyone left any notes for you. However, right out of the gate, that didn’t make any sense. When someone sends you a message or comments on your photo, you get a notification on the Facebook home page. So you click on that and go to read the message or the comment. There is never any need for you to go to your own Wall. In fact, the Wall’s function ended up being reversed. Rather than you checking your own Wall for messages, it became a place for your friends to visit to see what you’ve been up to. In the regular News Feed etc, you see most of what people are up to. However, you don’t see it all. Facebook has all their crazy algorithms, which combine with your preference settings to display only certain things. To see much more of what a person has been up to – posted photos, comments left for them by other people, status updates – you go to THEIR Wall and see everything all in one place. This new layout pushes the Profile page back towards a place for YOU to visit. It’s more a scrapbook of your life, something you might look over yourself, which brings me around to the second big thing that has happened – the conversion of the Wall into the Timeline.

There are many differences between the old Wall and the new Timeline, which replaces it. For one, the Timeline shows EVERYTHING going back in time essentially to the day you were born. The Wall showed old posts, status updates, and other Facebooks things only up to a certain point in the past. Then it just stopped. The Timeline displays everything back to the day you joined Facebook.

The new Timeline also allows you to insert new events in the past and to backdate things. In fact, the new system encourages this. Facebook wants people to go back and add lots of information to their Timeline until it becomes a written and graphic representation of their entire life. You may have joined Facebook only two years ago, but the new Timeline allows you to go back way before that and add events that happened five years ago, twenty years ago, fifty years ago, etc.

Is this a good thing? On the face of it, why not? You don’t have to do any of this. You can just leave your Timeline alone and it will take care of itself. But for those that are interested, they can work on it and add old photos and events in their life and they can have an interesting digital scrapbook of their life.

Yet, I can see a problem here – one that has, for me, haunted Facebook all along. This problem is somewhat conceptual in that it’s never completely clear how Facebook is supposed to work. What, exactly, is it? Where do I go to see this or to do that? Has anyone ever tried to teach their parents how to use Facebook? It was confusing, wasn’t it? It’s never been intuitive. It’s hard to distinguish between the Home page and the Profile page and the News Feed and all the other units. I see the same fundamental tension in the Timeline. On the one hand, it can be a scrapbook of your life – essentially a very elaborate “About Me” page. You can insert the day you were born and add baby pictures. You can insert the date of your fifth birthday and insert pictures of you blowing out the candles on your birthday cake. You can document the day you graduated from university. You can insert the dates of your trip to India along with the pictures you took. In the end, you’ll have a wonderful pictorial representation of your life. I believe Facebook even has a little tool that will then automatically create a mini-movie out of all this content.

But the Timeline will also contain a running list of all the status updates, comments from friends, links, likes, and all that other Facebook flotsam and jetsam. So you’ve got a very nice scrapbook of your life, but mixed in with it are the hundreds or thousands of inane status updates you made stating that you had pizza for lunch or that it’s raining outside or that “woot woot” you are meeting your besties for a night on the town. It’s mixing apples and oranges. And Facebook always does that.

In the end, though, the biggest problem with the Timeline might simply be that two-column layout with the staggered posts. I don’t know what it is, but that layout just bugs people. It bugs me. I can see how it might have seemed like a good idea. The old Wall had just one column and all the items were in one long list, the newest on top and the older ones underneath. It was simple and clean. But it wasted a lot of space on the screen. So for the Timeline, they made two columns side-by-side. These two columns are actually each wider than the original single column of the Wall. They might look cluttered and small, but they are actually wider. And the items are still in chronological order. The problem is that it isn’t intuitive to see that order. Each item has a little arrow pointing to a dot on the Timeline. You can look at those arrows to see which item comes next in time. It’s all very logical and useful, but the order of the items – the thing that is perhaps most important in a Timeline – is not immediately apparent. It looks, for all intents and purposes, like a giant grid, and your eye just doesn’t know where to look first.

I think this instant visual reaction of “Blah! What the heck is this?” is what fueled the usual backlash and resistance to this new Timeline feature. As an aside, I’ll say that Facebook could have done a better job preparing people for this change and selling them on it. I’m a fairly heavy Facebook user, and I had no idea that this change was even taking place! I’m not sure how Facebook can better inform its hundreds of millions of users of changes, but there’s no question that they can do a better job. This imposition of changes always feels very heavy-handed. People generally don’t like change, and we need to be babied into it. People especially don’t like change when it means they have to do more work. The old Wall was fine and didn’t require any work. But the new Timeline Profile layout requires you to act – at a minimum to go over your Timeline and delete things you don’t want visible to the public anymore. It used to be that everyone’s Facebook pages looked pretty much the same. Now, those who put in the work will be able to produce a very nice looking Profile page. People will feel pressure about this. Here’s one more thing on the Internet I have to maintain and tweak and learn about.

I’ve had a day or two to play around with the new layout and the Timeline feature, and I have to say that after my initial negative reaction, I’ve come to like it. I mean, it’s hard to argue that the addition of all these features is a bad thing. It has really taken away nothing. The Profile page is still there and all the basic components are still there. Even the Wall is essentially still there. It is just several orders of magnitude more complex and is now called Timeline. It’s true that it has two columns instead of one and is perhaps a bit intimidating because of that. However, even that can be changed. Every item on your Timeline can be resized so that it fills up both columns completely. Then it even looks just like the old Wall, just wider.

My conclusion is that the new Timeline Profile page is a very good thing. It just strikes people the wrong way because they have no idea what it is. Once you dive in and start reading up on all the new features and how things work, it starts to make sense. Even the two-column layout of the Timeline starts to feel familiar after a short time. It will take most people several hours of playing around to figure it all out. And then if you wanted to transform your Timeline into something very special, you could spend weeks working on it. In my next post, I’ll try to go into the new features and how they work.

 

Tags: Facebook, Facebook Timeline, job, menu, Profile, Timeline, Timeline Profile