On September 30th, just as everyone was starting to get comfortable, Facebook is scheduled to change… again; this time much more dramatically. Luckily, Facebook offered a preview to a select few people… those who offer a strong marketing presence, good looks, and the willingness to to complete a publicly-made 8 step process to develop the preview. Before everyone starts stressing out on the new changes and threatens permanent exile to Google+, I’ve outlined a preview of what’s in store. There’s a lot, but it’s worth the read.
- Your Timeline - Visually, all of your activity is now in timeline form on your profile page. It’s basically how your wall has always been constructed, but it’s visually enhanced. Scrolling through Facebook history is easier (and more entertaining) to see what you were doing and who you were talking to years ago. At the bottom of the timeline are your Friends, Events, Places, and “Liked” Apps.
- View Activity – This button is for you to view all of your activity (private only to you). You can also change privacy for individual items.
- Highlight What’s Important - If there’s a story on your timeline that you want to highlight, you can enlarge it to make it stand out. You can also remove it altogether.
- Cover Picture - This image is at the top of your Facebook page and about 5 times larger than your profile picture. Just like your profile picture, you can change it as often as you’d like while magnifying how ridiculously good looking you are.
- Facebook Gestures - Now, you don’t have to “Like” everything you do. Facebook’s partners will allow other options, so you’ll be able to promote that you “Listened to” a particular song, ”Read” a news story, or whatever other gestures the application or website sets as an option.
- Facebook Ticker - You’ve already seen this rolled out earlier this week, but now trivial information from your friends will show only on the ticker and not in your normal news feed. Your news feed will show the info you actually want to see, not who’s playing Words With Friends.
- Facebook’s Partnerships - Now you’ll be able to listen to music from Spotify, read news from Yahoo or other news apps, and watch a TV show from Hulu through Facebook. This info will display on your Facebook Ticker, not the News Feed.
- Facebook Subscriptions - You can now
stalksubscribe to people you don’t know without permission, which will probably have the most impact on celebrities, but is an option for anyone. For your own profile, you can edit what information is posted publicly or for your certain groups of contacts. You do have the option to view your Public Profile to see what others are seeing.
Everything about you is now in one place, and you can now easily see everything you've done on Facebook and edit permissions levels for all of it.
Facebook feels that these changes will make the social network powerhouse more engaging to users, and also helps clean up the layout that has been described by many as being too cluttered. So far, I’m impressed with what I’ve seen. What do you think of the changes that are being made?
Most significant update yet from our friends at Facebook – and the most well designed one yet. Timeline has tons of potential – and the expansions to the Open Graph platform will become very useful for application developers. LIKE.
I love it. What I like the most about Timeline is the ability to go back to your previous posts, a great way to read up on what you were doing at a certain point in time. Also, the way it’s set up, you can tell “the story of your life” by uploading pictures or posting statuses at specific dates. I’m going to have to scan all those old baby pictures and upload them there soon.