Your facebook life on the line

The Facebook Timeline 

Last September, Facebook unveiled a design overhaul of the user profile, Timeline, at its f8 developers conference in San Francisco, USA.

Until lately, Timeline was only available to facebook app developers and a number of users through a beta activation process. The activation guideline was published by news sites like Mashable and Business Insider and was also spread through one's news feed through social media channels. This was how I activated my Timeline last October and had a chance to tinker with it.

But now, through a simple activation process detailed in this post by facebook, Timeline will become the new landing page for one's Facebook profile, replacing the older profile design. It is a complete redesign that aims to simplify and organize all your facebook activities & stories in a single place. Some may find Timeline as another complicated facebook feature as it presents a new interface and puts design considerations in the user, but a few days of actively using  it can put one at ease with Timeline.

As the name suggests, Timeline is a chronological order of your facebook stories, starting from the day you were born to the day you joined facebook. From there, Timeline will integrate all your facebook activities and display it in alternating rectangular frames, enabling one to see multiple stories at the same time.

In Timeline, the user can choose to highlight an event, a story, a video or a picture and facebook will enlarge it and display it across both frames and more prominently than a regular post, like in the picture I chose to feature in my Timeline.

What the Facebook Timeline aims to achieve is to have the user reminisce their "uploaded life"  and rekindle the individual connections from posts of friends, colleagues & family. This makes the activity more personal as one is brought back in time to old online memories.

For me, this was achieved as I found myself a little nostalgic especially when viewing past pictures & status updates, which Timeline brings to life much easily with just a few clicks on a specific year. After bringing the outline of the years, a simple scroll through highlights the specific year in pictures and activities will be literally brought out before your eyes.  This can also be true from the point of view of a friend or a family member browsing through your profile.

There were some initial bugs present in Timeline like portions of my timeline would suddenly appear and replace the timeline of the one I was viewing. There were also difficulties in loading the entire timeline year but knowing how fast facebook acts and fixes these bugs, these nuances will be brought to function more effectively in the future.

In a blog post, Facebook noted that "When you upgrade to Timeline, you'll have seven days to review everything that appears on your timeline before anyone else can see it. You can also choose to publish your timeline at any time during the review period. If you decide to wait, your Timeline will go live automatically after seven days."


I suggest that you review your past updates and activities as you may have tagged pictures which you don't want others to see or may have forgotten to take down or any past online story that you may want to hide. The seven day review will also serve as a mini time travel throughout your facebook life.


Enjoy the ride.