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Facebook Timeline

December 15, 2011 by · Comments Off on Facebook Timeline 

Facebook Timeline, Facebook is finally rolling out Timeline globally, meaning you can join Britney Spears, Tim Tebow, and Mark Zuckerberg in creating a curated look at the span of your life from birth to the present day. You may not have such exciting landmarks as “my first Rolling Stone cover,” “my first NFL touchdown,” or “my first million,” but it is a way to showcase your greatest party pics of all time. Timeline is intended to shift your Facebook profile page from the current “snapshot of you” to something akin to a scrapbook of your entire life. It will surface what it perceives to be your most important Facebook activity (based on likes and comments) from the entirety of your time on the site. That means your account is about to be mined for the juiciest stuff.

Facebook is giving all of its users a seven day period to curate their Timeline before it goes live. “As you explore your timeline, you may see stories that you want to feature, like your graduation or the day you bought your first car. There might also be stuff that you want to remove or hide from your timeline,” writes Facebook engineer Paul McDonald in a blog post explaining how.

This is going to force users to do some privacy housekeeping. Every item on the Timeline will have a little “privacy dropdown box” so you can decide who you want to see it: the world, just friends, just me, etc. Limiting items to just your friends seems like a good privacy control, but that depends on how liberal you’ve been in friending people. Students in a technology class at Yale have created a nifty little quiz, called What’s Her Face-book, to help Facebook users figure out how well they know the people they’re connected to on the site. The quiz requests permission to access photos from Facebook and then shows you pictures of a handful of your friends and asks you to identify them. I have over 1,200 friends on the site; I took the quiz and got an abysmal score…

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