On Thursday the 22nd of September CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg took the stage at the company’s annual F8 Developer Conference in San Francisco to announce an evolved profile page called Timeline.Users have already experienced changes to their Facebook; having a new real-time news feed a subscribe feature and improved friends’ lists. However these changes only form part of a major revamp that is to happen shortly. As affirmed by Facebook’s CTO Bret Taylor Timeline will be rolled out progressively “over the next couple of months”.
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This new concept brings about the evolution of the user’s profile. In its initial phase Facebook’s profile was only about the “first five minutes of a conversation” as described by Zuckerberg. You get to know the name of the person age nationality and maybe the job and interests. When Facebook introduced the stream users were sharing statuses. This represents the next fifteen minutes of a conversation. But the latest updates where burying others down beneath “Older Posts”. The photos of your graduation get replaced by updates about what you had for breakfast this morning.Facebook has thus introduced Timeline to bring all stories together representing your whole life onto one page. According to Zuckerberg Timeline embodies “the next few hours of a great in-depth and engaging conversation”. It is a visual story of one’s life including all stories and apps that help you express who you are. All your great stories do not vanish as you add new ones.
Profiles are much more visual including a chronological navigation. Apart from the users’ profile picture the first thing to be noticed is a large photo at the top referred to as Cover which represents who you are. Further down there are the users’ posts photos and life events as they happened in time. Users can control what to show on their timeline how to display it and who can see it. If there are any important stories which are not included in your timeline you can go back to when they happened and add them.
Timeline also introduces a new kind of social app that lets you show the things you like to do – such as the movies you watch music you listen to and food you cook – applications that help your friends discover what you are up to. During the summit Mark Zuckerberg also showed how the latest revamp works beautifully on mobile devices which is a clear acknowledgment to the importance which smart phones play in Facebook’s growth.
While some people are up for change and enhancements others lament that Timeline includes too many functions and gibberish on their screens predicting that Facebook will see its way downwards afte
Tags: Facebook, Social Media