Last week the F8 conference for developers saw Zuckerberg announce some pretty significant changes to Facebook. The most interesting of which is Timeline.

A few new things have been implemented already, the Ticker on the right hand side of the page that delivers ALL updates from your friends in real time and the revamped friends lists. What is on the way though represents something of a step change.

Timeline, set to replace your profile, aggregates and organizes your life into chronological order, all the things you’ve posted on the site, starting with your D.O.B. when you first registered, are available, you can then jump into individual years for more detail. It can also be filtered by different actions, so you can view your timeline just in photos or just in status updates and so on. Of course for most of us there is going to be a vast jump between date of birth and actual Facebook activity so you are of course able to add pics, videos, narrative and so on to fill in the gaps and create a complete digital documentation of your life.

Privacy I hear you say? Well not that it’s ever really stopped them before, but yes of course, you will able to select exactly who is able to see your timeline.

Inevitably some will love it and others loathe it but before long it will simply be part of our daily life and we’ll struggle to remember what profiles even looked like.

Another major change is around frictionless sharing, the aim here is to make it as easy as possible to share content, ie websites or apps only needing to get permission once and then everything you view/do within them will be shared…umm, not sure about that!

But back to Timeline, is Facebook missing the point? Hasn’t it always been about communicating and distributing content and data? Not archiving it? What do you think?

It should be live to all users by the end of week.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 28th, 2011 at 11:52 am and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.