Facebook is letting users play with their Timelines for seven days before taking them live.
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Facebook spokesperson Meredith Chin took me on a tour of her own Facebook Timeline page yesterday. Facebook employees and developers already have access to the new design, as do those eager to try it out who took advantage of a hack-around. Chin tells me that one million people have already activated Timeline. As for the rest of us, Facebook says it’s coming “soon,” and indicated that it’ll likely be available within a month.
Timeline is intended to shift your Facebook profile page from the current “snapshot of you” to something akin to a scrapbook of your entire life. It will surface what it perceives to be your most important Facebook activity (based on likes and comments) from the entirety of your time on the site, with an easy year-by-year guide on the side to sort through the timeline. And yes, the guide does include a spot for “born” — time to start uploading your baby pics.
“We wanted a way to showcase the big moments,” said Chin. “It’s a return on investment for what users have put into Facebook over the years.”
That may well be, but some people are also a bit freaked out at the idea that their accounts are about to be mined for the juiciest stuff. Facebook has learned some privacy lessons. Instead of forcing this on its users all at once, it’s initially inviting them to turn the feature on, and is then giving them seven days to curate the Timeline before it goes “live” for other people to see. (It’s an “invitation” for now, but eventually you’ll have to get on board. Facebook will flip the switch on everyone’s accounts at some point, probably within a year. “It’s too hard for developers to work with two different types of code,” says Chin.)
Giving people a week to curate is important, because Timeline may surface things you had forgotten you had put on the site — some of those things may make you nostalgic and some of those things may be reputation-threatening (E.g., “Wow, didn’t realize I was tagged in those photos from last year’s Halloween party where we made fun of people whose homes had been foreclosed!”). That’s the privacy cleanse aspect of this. Forcing users to curate their Timelines on the site will make them go back and review the privacy settings on photos, videos, and status messages they posted to the site years ago…
“Someone may have made their party photos viewable to their friends in college, when all of their friends were fellow students,” says Chin. “But now their friends include their boss and co-workers, and they may not want those people to see their drinking photos.” More
