My 5 Minutes with Facebook Timeline

September 26, 2011 - I'm impatient when it comes to waiting to try new features, and when I heard that I could get my hands dirty in Facebook's Timeline earlier than the general release, I had to do it.

Unfortunately, I had a busy weekend and didn't get to set it up and really play with it as planned, so I had to wait until I got into the office this morning to get things rolling. As I poked around, I realized this could be a HUGE distraction, and I have content to write! That being said, I've decided to give you an impression of what the first 5 minutes of your Timeline experience may feel like.

The current view of Timeline in developer mode.

At first glance it has similarities to a LinkedIn profile with the little personal bio/resume synopsis under your photo in the upper left. For those of you who love customizing, you can change your profile pic here, and also add a "cover" (mine is our awesome WDWC sign that's on the wall behind my desk).

Facebook auto-populates your Timeline based on the content you've already published. It's not a left-to-right progression like most timelines, but a top-to-bottom...as you scroll you see all the posts that you've made in the past days, weeks and month. Then there's an option to expand into next month to see what you did in the past.

There are links everywhere to add entries to the Timeline, so you can go back and retroactively mark an important event that you failed to mention. If you're really super serious about getting all the main milestones of your life pre-Facebook on there, you could potentially spend days going back and adding entries.

So, what does this really mean for using Facebook? It's definitely a switch to a personal format rather than a friend-watcher like the current news feed update made it to be. Right now, you have to click the "Home" link to get back to your news feed to see what your friends are up to - Timeline is all about what you're doing.

It's social in a new sense - your Timeline is a way for people to see your life story as told by Facebook (and expanded on by you). Will Timeline work for business pages? We've yet to see, but when it rolls out publically on October 3 (the date according to the developer app) we'll keep our brains set to marketing!

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