Zuckerberg bored; enter Timeline

Tell your life story with a new kind of profile. Or so the marketing material goes. The latest revamp of the Facebook profile page has divided opinion among many people and it has not been embraced by as many people or as widely as Mark Zuckerberg would have wanted. These changes are possibly more far-reaching than any single modification to our favourite social network in its entire history. Like it or not, they will be made compulsory for everyone within the next month.

In case you’ve blocked yourself from online procrastination for the last three months, the Facebook Timeline is a new way of presenting your photos, status updates and all the other great things that adorn what is currently your Wall.

Possibly the first new feature of the Timeline that you’ll notice is the Cover Photo – a banner which stretches across the top of your profile and dominates what visitors to your profile will see when they first visit it. Profile pictures have now been relegated to a small square displayed on the bottom left corner of the Cover Photo, and are still used throughout the site and displayed next to your name in all your posts scattered across your friends’ virtual lives.

There is also an increased amount of customisation that is given to users – every time someone tags you in a photo, or a comment, it goes straight to the ‘Activity Log’. This is a brand new view of all our activity since joining Facebook. From here, we can see absolutely everything that we have done on the network, and it is possible to manually hide things or set Facebook to prod you via a notification to get you to approve new posts onto your Timeline before it shows up. This is a great way to ensure that those embarrassing banterful photos of your Sports Night antics don’t end up as a banner on your profile page.

The downsides however are numerous, and mainly revolve around privacy issues; yet again a thorny issue which has cropped up throughout Facebook’s history. Firstly, the default privacy options for new Timeline posts are actually set to ‘Public’, which means that what is likely your entire life will be available for all, including Google and your potential employers to see. In addition you will be dragged kicking and screaming to the new format, and you will need to prepare yourself. It is currently possible to conduct a seven-day trial of the new Timeline feature where you can purge everything that you don’t want others to see.