Musings on the Facebook timeline

While I was on Christmas vacation, I took the fact that I had some free time as an opportunity to play around with Facebook's new Timeline feature and write up some thoughts about it. Short version is that it's a replacement for your Facebook Wall that uses a different presentation and different navigation for the information that it contains about you. Unlike many recent changes, it doesn't seem to affect the News Feed, and so there's generally less impact to people in terms of their day-to-day usage of FB, which is a good thing.

So, people might ask, "why fix what isn't broken?" My view is that this was actually broken, and Timeline is a welcome fix (or at least a step in the right direction), and I'll attempt to explain why.

Social networking sites are an online persona. You can put as much or as little effort into it as you want, share as much or as little as you want, and to some extent control the groups of people with which you share different bits of information about yourself and your life. But really it's all about capturing aspects of your life for the purposes of your own reminiscing or to share with others. We've been doing it for years. Some people use physical diaries and scrapbooks or photo albums, others blog (long form) with varying degrees of consistency, the rest of us use things like FB and Twitter as a (short form) way to share bits that are not worth blogging about but are (hopefully) interesting to someone else on the internet. If you use Facebook or Twitter semi-regularly, look back at some of your old Tweets/Status messages and Wall posts. It's an interesting set of snippets of what you were doing, thinking about, etc. Add in photos, links, and other things, and it captures a reasonable view of who you are (or were at the time of the post), your experiences, etc. When I look back on those things periodically, I find all sorts of things that I've forgotten about - little conversations I thought were funny, links that are cool, etc. It's an online trip down memory lane in a way. A lot of the stuff is pretty mundane, but that's sort of what makes it interesting to me, because the mundane details are the most quickly forgotten.

However, social networking sites as a whole have been very bad about emphasizing the ephemeral nature of the medium to the detriment of the historical record that it could serve. They are essentially live streams of what's happening, and they don't have a good method to filter, preserve, or identify things that are more important so that those who aren't on the site regularly (casual users) can still see the things that they would be interested in seeing. The fact that Facebook routinely changes the News Feed UI in an (usually unsuccessful) attempt to present more relevant information and improve the signal-to-noise ratio is a good demonstration of the problem with the amount of information flowing through the average person's feed and its relevance. While nothing actually disappears from the Internet, it does tend to get buried under the newest layer of debris, so much so that the social networking sites often view "security by obscurity" as good enough - if you are embarrassed by that photo, wait a week or so and it'll disappear from everyone's feed and they'll all forget about it. And $deity help you if you need to find an old post in your (or someone else's) history... So the general problem is that it's hard to navigate or search old items, especially if the information is not public, since you can't use Google to search it, and it's presented in a way that's generally not intuitive.

This is where the idea of the Timeline really shines. It makes both managing and presenting the information about you and your life as a historical record much more intuitive and much less of an afterthought.

The main benefit that I see for the Timeline so far is that it's much smarter about the relationship of time to your posts, so it has some new features to manage that chronology more effectively. Most notably, you can enter what FB is calling "life events" that well precede the time that you actually signed up for Facebook, including your birth, times when you have moved, gotten married, trips you've taken, job changes, etc. In addition, you can do things like back-date old photos so that they appear at the right part of your life, so that  high-school yearbook photo can now show up when you were actually in high-school, instead of just whenever you found it and posted it, and you can see the chronological progression of your photos much more easily. They've also more tightly integrated location awareness into the timeline, so that you can see not just when, but also where. This includes a built-in map with pins on it for different places that you've lived, visited, etc, which has been previously managed through third-party applications. This is beneficial because it includes and integrates things like photos and posts, instead of simply being a list that you have to populate and track separately of the places that you've been. And my guess is that as more people "fix" things on their timelines, it'll have the net effect of making the timeline better for those who are tagged in their posts as well, so it'll continue to improve throughout the rollout. But probably the biggest thing is that there's now a Star button that you can click to highlight a given post, such that it gets featured in the timeline independent of what FB's (mostly crappy) algorithms think is relevant/worth highlighting to the average person. Used properly, it's likely to help casual users gain more value from the time that they do spend on the site, because they're more likely to see things that their friends think are relevant.

While the more cynical side of me sees this as a (clever) way for Facebook to entice you to spend even more time on the site, add even more personal information, upload more photos, etc, on balance I do think that it's a useful change. The standard caveats about knowing what is happening with your information before you choose to share it and not sharing things that you will later be ashamed of definitely still apply here.

That said, there are a few implementation details that I found a bit annoying.
First, it appears that all new Life Events default to the Public privacy setting. While it's easy to change them, if you're not careful, you end up sharing a lot more stuff with everyone instead of just your friends and family. This is especially important since some of it might be used to social engineer information that is often used as passwords/PINs like your birthdate, anniversary date, mother's maiden name, etc. Related to this, Facebook has not completely integrated the privacy controls between the timeline and what already was out there - if you go to change the visibility/privacy settings for some items, you'll get a message that those must be changed from the "about" setting page, instead of simply linking the privacy settings together such that you can change them from either place. That's just lazy implementation, and there's no excuse for it.

Second, there doesn't seem to be an intuitive way to link the Life Event entries with the pictures and other posts that are associated with it. It seems to me that it would make a lot of sense to be able to select a group of status updates, photos, videos, etc and create a grouping of them that are associated with that life event (say the birth of a child, a wedding, etc) so that it all shows up in one place. Right now, the closest thing that you can do is to ensure that the location and date information are correct on all of the above such that they all show up relatively nearby in the timeline.

Third, FB seems to be inconsistent about whether you can change the date on a picture that you're tagged in - if someone else posts a "historical" picture of you and doesn't populate the date correctly, you may or may not be able to change the date yourself so that it shows up in the right place on your timeline. I haven't been able to figure out why this is, other than to assume that it's somehow related to the permissions of the post and the gradual roll-out of Timeline support to the FB user community.

Lastly, FB has some formatting enhancements that they need to do to improve the actual visual presentation of the Timeline.  It appears that the design width for your information is 720 pixels, since that's the size of the "cover photo" that they recommend. The problem is that the orientation of posts and photos is static on the timeline. The timeline has two post sizes - half width and full-width. Full-width is for featured posts, half width is for everything else. There is no way to control the vertical dimensions, and there is no way to manage the zoom/crop of pictures posted in individual items. Since most pictures are a lot larger (wider) than 720 pixels, the aspect ratio for display is pretty important. The only thing that you can do is control which portion of the picture is visible in the static matte that the post contains, and that's only on Life Event items, not on photo albums and the like. This means that pictures are routinely cut off or simply can't be used in those items because they don't show what you want them to show. For example, a portrait-orientation picture (tall, instead of wide) is not likely to work because the posts are all set up for landscape orientation. If you're FB friends with me, you can see two pictures on my timeline that show this - the baby picture that I posted of myself (click "Born" on the timeline), and the picture that I posted of me holding my newborn daughter. Both are zoomed in too far to be able to show the whole subject of the photo.

[EDIT 12/31/11] - one additional thing that I've discovered - there is no logical linkage between life events shared by two people. That is, even if I tag someone in a life event that I build (eg birth of child, trip we took together, etc), instead of even giving them the option to use the same life event on their timeline, all it does is show "[person1] was tagged in [person2]'s [life event]." at the right date on the timeline. FB already has the linkage between the two people, it should be trivial to allow that sort of interaction. It's there...sort of, because you can click on the person's name and see their timeline, but you might not see any more information if that person hasn't done anything with their timeline for that event. So this sort of blows my theory about the timeline improving as those around you tag you in posts.


If you're looking for some good info and tips on managing your timeline, as usual Lifehacker has a useful post on the matter.