Yesterday, I mentioned how Facebook may have been appealing less to the idea of friendship.
Then, suddenly, there was the announcement of Facebook Timeline and everything went crazy.
Facebook Timeline is still in the beta stages at the moment, but will become standard on the social networking site by the end of this month. I was able to change my profile to see what it would look like. Here it is:
When I first set it as my profile, it made me panic. My status updates were no longer as chronological as I would like. Instead, they seemed randomly spaced across two columns. But then, suddenly, I realised what was so amazing about it.
On the right hand side of the above photo, you can just about make out where it says ‘Now’ down to ‘Born’. If you click on ‘Born’ on my profile now, it takes you right down to a picture of when I was cute and surrounded by teddy bears. (For some reason, it also says my brother is older, even though when you click on 1992 it clearly shows that he was in fact born in 1992 and is therefore not older than me.)
But those buttons, dating from today to the day I was born is what is instantly wonderful about this new Facebook Profile. In the last hour, I have been scrolling through the years I have been on Facebook, reading statuses I forgot I made, wall posts I probably would never have read again otherwise and seeing photos that, although in folders all over my computer, I hadn’t seen in a long time. My Facebook Profile does tell you about my life.
I had to add a few things. My holiday in December 2009 to the Caribbean seemed not to exist, and my holiday to Edinburgh was not visible. A few clicks, and they appeared.
With Timeline you can choose what is visible and what isn’t. I have always said that I had nothing to hide on my Facebook, but some statuses were too uninteresting to keep visible forever. Equally, some important parts of my life were missing.
But, nagging in the back of my mind was one word: privacy, privacy, privacy. I wanted it back.
I did notice that as I created new little posts, the bottom of each one was automatically set to ‘public’. As I said yesterday, my Facebook is a very private creature, accessible only to friends and family. I did not want the details of my birth and graduation from high school open to the whole world. (Okay, the whole world would never care enough about me to read my profile, but it’s the principle that matters).
There is one important setting with the new Facebook that anyone similar to me must, must click. If you go to your privacy settings, there is an option that says: “Limit the Audience for Past Posts.” This changes all of your public posts to friends only. A big relief for people who don’t want to be accessed by the whole world.
A story caught my attention yesterday. A woman used baby photos from another woman’s Facebook to convince her ex that they had had a baby together. First off – creepy. But it does remind you that Facebook is on the internet, and the internet is a public domain.
Imagine walking into town and seeing a huge billboard filled with photos of you. It would be unnerving. Leaving your Facebook Timeline (it is not a Wall anymore) public is the same thing. Anyone can see it.
The new Timeline is wonderful. I loved reading my old messages, seeing all the things people wrote to me on my birthday and viewing all my old photographs. But nothing was automatically private. And I hated that.
In a week’s time, everyone will experience the new Facebook Timeline. Just be sure to take a look at your privacy settings when it does emerge.
By the way – the cover photo (the large photo) is public. There is no way to change this. So, be choosy over your cover photo.
Metaphorical Elephants 
Have to say timeline is great! I’ve tried it too and its really cool. It’s nice to be able to see everything from the past so easily. And actually, everything seems to load quicker too! Shame they decided to make the default privacy setting public though… nice that you can just change everything to friends with the touch of a button though. All in all, I’m pretty impressed – lets see how it goes when they suddenly add music sharing in a few days 😛
One thing I have slight concerns over is that I don’t think the ‘maps’ feature is private at all. And also, if it had been private, it would have been nice to add places to it, to give a bigger picture of places you’d visited. As it happens, it looks like I’ve never left Swanage and Brighton because they’re the only times I’ve ever ‘checked-in’ somewhere. Not fun to be stalked, but it would be nice to be able to stamp the places you went on holiday etc.
Yeh, although at least you can now check into a place from your computer, so it should be easier to add things like holidays in the future. The map thing doesnt seem to be private, but you can’t really be stalked, unless you frequently check in at your home address, which is just a bad idea anyway… checking in at a public place shouldn’t really cause many problems.
Although I have just noticed that it seems to now put my location on my status updates as well so they show up on the map – only that I’m in Luton though, not a precise location. You can turn that off though.
I turned off the location thing as soon as it appeared. I just thought it was a tiny bit weird, to be honest. Though, everyone time I tweet from my phone it adds my location. It never used to.
So now it is time to say bye-bye to FaceBook. Being that I work from home FaceBook has been my “water-cooler” where I get some human interaction (not face-to-face) on my breaks. Google+ is out too so I’ll probably be going back to IRC rooms. I hope the exodus is big and this will hit FB and Google’s advertising revenue. I wonder if they will learn?