Facebook's New Timeline Layout: A Getting-Started Guide

23.09.2011
Facebook's new profile layout, Timeline, promises to turn your Facebook account into an online scrapbook where you can highlight important moments in your life and resurface past Facebook activity.

"Timeline is the story of your life...in a new way to express who you are," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Thursday announcing the new feature.

As its name suggests, Timeline organizes your life in reverse chronological order based on the content you've shared on your Facebook profile. The layout is designed as a dual-column view with a large main column for viewing content and a smaller one on the right for fast navigation.

If you've entered when you graduated high school or college, when you got married, when your first child was born or when you started a new job, all that data will show up in your Timeline. You can also go back and add photos and captions to important past events if you want to, or remove particularly embarrassing photos or other content from your new profile page.

Timeline is currently in a limited beta for developers but, when I found out you could activate it immediately (thanks to a little developer program trickery explained below), I jumped right in to see what all the fuss was about.

While Timeline still has a few bugs to work out, it was a very interesting way to experience Facebook and a great way to look at your past activity. But, in my tests, there were also some privacy changes that may give some users pause.