At the F8 conference, Facebook announced the features of their new profile, Timeline.
Timeline’s purpose is to bring content sharing and viewing to a whole other level. Even though it’s been out for a while, some features may still be a little confusing.
So here’s a little cheat sheet to break down the features for a regular user:
The Ticker – Located on the upper right hand corner of the Home page, Ticker is a real-time stream of your friends’ activity on Facebook. Users are able to see what their friends are doing as they do it, and essentially “join in” when they click on a Ticker item (say, wishing a mutual friend a “Happy Birthday” after seeing it done on your Ticker).
News Feed – Now broken into two categories: Top Stories and Recent Stories.
- Top Stories – A news feed of updates judged “most interesting” to you based on Facebook algorithms monitoring your interests and social connections.
- Most Recent – Summed up to me, as the section for the updates from everybody else.
Subscribe button – By clicking the “Subscribe” button on any person/brand/company’s page, you essentially opt-in to have their updates appear publicly on your News Feed. Existing friends are automatically subscribed to each other, and the feature also lets you filter how much content you want to see from particular people – handy for the Facebook oversharers you’re not too keen on unfriend-ing.
Smart Lists – Like on Twitter, utilizing the list feature allows you to group certain people together to see posts and send updates directed only to that group.
Activity Log – When clicked on, you’re essentially able to see anything and everything you’ve ever done since you first joined Facebook, right down to the year, month, day and time. Some additional features include:
- Map – This shows every place you checked in over the past year, shown by pins.
- Life Events – You can also add these to your Timeline to note particular moments in your life, like an engagement, death, etc.
Personally, I love it. As an admitted oversharer, I like that I can pretty much “peek in” to what my friends are up to, as well as incorporate my actions more into what is shared on Facebook.
The only thing that concerns me, of course, are the privacy issues that can certainly come into play with all the auto-posting going on, as well as the ‘Activity Log’ feature which essentially chronicles my entire Facebook history.
Not that I think I’d have anything to be too concerned about, but that’s something any soon-to-be college grad would be curious about, as well.