Sunday, December 18, 2011

Facebook gets Timeline mostly right.

Who is Andy Sparks, you ask?  Watch this short video from Facebook and you'll know! In one-and-a-half minutes you see his whole life (to-date), from birth through grade school, marriage, and raising his own child.  




And now you can have your whole life on-line too in pictures, video and posts through Facebook's new Timeline profile view.  In beta-testing for awhile, as of December 15, it's available everywhere by following this link https://www.facebook.com/about/timeline.  
With Facebook Timeline, instead of scrolling through pages and pages of posts, viewers of your profile can click on any year or month and get a snapshot of your life.  So it's a good idea to review those posts, because what you said in 2007 may not be all that relevant or accurate any more!


Once you get started transferring your profile to Timeline view, you have 7 days to complete it.  My personal page took just about 2 hours to go through because it's pretty light yet still goes back nearly 5 years. 


You can select pictures to enlarge, posts to hide from view, and add a oversize cover shot at the top of your profile.  Facebook has made creating your Timeline quick and fun and made scrolling someone else's life a lot easier.  


And they've got it mostly right; however, there are a couple things I hope Facebook cleans up. For example, review your privacy settings as things like who can see your friends reverted to everyone on my page.  Also, some of the display/app boxes near your name can't be deleted, and the map app box is particularly annoying.  It is painfully slow to add or correct a few key geographic locations of holiday locations, life events etc. I gave up and wished I could delete it. 


I'm sure it will get better over time. What improvements would you suggest


Have you updated your page yet? If not, I hope you have some fun updating your page before Facebook does it for you!