Last month, after rolling out some new features – top stories and a mini newsfeed that lets you Facebook while you Facebook – the social media giant Facebook announced that those were only the beginning of the changes, revealing they would soon unveil their most drastic change to the Facebook profile page: Facebook Timeline.
Basically, the premise of Facebook Timeline is pretty self-explanatory: everything you’ve done on Facebook will be placed on an easy-access Timeline for everyone’s viewing pleasure.
Although Facebook Timeline isn’t available yet, there’s a loophole that allows people to access it, and after much deliberation, I went ahead and upgraded. Keeping my personal opinions to myself, here are a few notable things about Facebook Timeline that you should know:
- Facebook will post as much information as possible onto your Timeline, but it’s up to you to fill in the blanks. The Timeline dates back all the way to your birth, and there’s a huge gap from your birth year until the day you joined Facebook. The idea is that hopefully you will go back and add things such as photos from your youth and other milestones and experiences that occurred pre-Facebook.
- Or not. Yes, you can fill in the blanks and upload that picture from your first birthday, or you can just leave that gap in your Timeline. You can also opt to “hide” things from your Timeline. Just keep in mind that “hide” is equivalent to deleting the information from your Timeline.
- Privacy settings are a little iffy. This may just be a glitch in the system, but it seems that your privacy settings may not matter on the Timeline. My new page is just as limited to the public as my previous profile page, but items that were restricted to them before are now visible. So far, you can hide something from your Timeline, but not from everybody. There’s no option to hide posts that are already on your Timeline from specific people. Of course, it may just be a kink that’s being worked on – or it may just be part of the program whenever Timeline goes public.
- But not everything goes on your Timeline. The old profile not only included things that you and friends posted on your wall, but also your recent activity on the site. With Facebook Timeline, all your recent activity that did not take place on your Timeline is visible only to you. So yes, the outrageous and sometimes inappropriate things you write on other people’s profiles won’t be displayed on your Timeline.