Looks like a digital, semi-automated scrapbook. From my understanding, it's not an overhaul of the profile, but another view of your online identity. If they pull it off it could be pretty cool.
Good question. I'd imagine that's part of the logic behind giving you "complete control" :)
I'm also interested to see how they associate old photos and other pre-Facebook content with dates.
It's done by date posted, but you can edit those dates. I am going to look into whether the API can change timeline dates programmatically, since OurDoings is perfect for backfilling a timeline semi-automatically with EXIF data.
I have always wondered why people are so shamed of their past emotions. Ex-girlfriends are part of your life, part of who you are even if you don't want to admit it.
I suspect it to be somehow a configurable feature or you can always remove those manually.
It's not a matter of being ashamed of ex-girlfriends (maybe sometimes it is). The problem is my wife doesn't want to go on my Facebook profile and see pictures of a dozen ex-girlfriends. And I don't want those showing up in there automatically and having to explain.
Rating how good your past girlfriends were in bed?
Describing how you had the best valentines day with a previous girlfriend, and not with your current wife?
People like to believe they're special. Talking too much about ex-gf/bf's is a recipe for disaster. They can't handle the truth!
Do you tell your wife her ass looks big as well? ;)
Of course she does. I don't even know with any certainty that she would dislike my having pictures of exes in my Facebook profile. I don't know that she would want any kind of explanation either.
What I do know is I roll my eyes every time a piece of mail shows up from her old IRA account with her previous married name on it. I know I would be uncomfortable with a bunch of pictures of old boyfriends and an ex husband mixed in with pictures of us and our son on Facebook. I realize she has a past and that's part of who she is now, but I am perfectly happy to leave some of those things in the past. I don't need or want daily reminders. I don't think she does either.
Given my own feelings about the issue, I choose to treat her the way I want to be treated.
I chose ex girlfriends as an example, it could be anything in your past that was "important" but you would rather not have highlighted (e.g. jail time, gang affiliations, being a Backstreet Boys superfan).
They give you control to add / remove things from the timeline so it probably won't be an issue, I'm just curious how they handle those topics.
You can control it, so you can hide or show whatever you want. However, in my case anyway, my ex-girlfriends have fundamentally shaped who I am and I would keep them visible in my timeline because of that.
It is also starting to look a lot like what myspace was. Of course, without allowing customization, they could make it look a lot cleaner and meaningful but only time will tell.
It pretty much is a digital scrapbook. I think allot of FB users will like it. I personally don't see a need for it though.
However I can see the people who currently use scrapbooks and are on fb, really use it on fb.
As a business decision, I think it's a good one. It will keep some of their customers engaged. I am curious to which demographic will really like the feature.
I am banking that fb thinks that the "popular" users will really use it. By "popular" I mean user(s) in any fb graph, that have the most profile views from other users in that same graph. The users that in a fb graph, people want to keep up with the most.
Those users I think don't necessarily have to be early adopters. They are just popular.
FB as business to grow just has
1.) Maintain Users
2.) Have Current Users use the site more and create more content on it
That is probably why we are seeing more and more features to keep users engaged.
Whatever happened to just "being a utility"? All of these new features really don't line up with Zuckerberg's vision of Facebook.*
*At least my impression of his vision, given that he often describes Facebook as a utility.
Edit: sorry, what did I say that was so offensive? In every single interview I've seen with Zuckerberg, he talks about Facebook being a utility. How does adding various features (like the timeline) correspond with that at all?
Not sure why this is downvoted, it's a valid point. It has become less of a utility. Facebook messaging is akin to AOL e-mail. Let me access my data and interact with my friends in a Google-way of efficient minimalism please.
"FB as a utility" can happen only if they maintain their humongous userbase.
Nobody signs up to FB "because I'll have a single-sign-on identity to use somewhere else"; they sign up to interact with their friends/family/peers, play silly games and post pictures of their cats. Zuckerberg has to constantly throw them a bone to keep them sweet while he goes spreading "Like" buttons and SSO apis through the web.
The way he's managed to eat Google's lunch for five years, by coming to the SSO problem from a completely opposite trajectory, is impressive and quite cunning in its own way. I do believe however that in the long run G+ will probably do to them what IE did to Netscape.
Have they added a way to change the date on a photo? Because those scanned 80's photos in the demo aren't going to show up in the 80's if you uploaded them in 2010.
Edit: Sounds like you drag the existing photos to the timeline to add them in the appropriate place. Better than nothing...
I had to look up "Dear Sophie", and it was a great video. However, the underlying tech is just email with attachments - nothing new. Facebook's timeline seems to be quite a bit more, with a visual aspect and ability to comment, share, etc. It's probably been done before but far from a ripoff of email...
This looks like a new feature rather than reinventing the main way you interact with Facebook. Your comment seems directed at the changes they made in the past few days rather than the link in this thread.
to me it looks like this is the new default layout for the website, it says "a new kind of profile" in the title and the site title is "introducing new profile." Maybe I'm wrong...
I take that back. I think you're right that they're changing the profile. After watching the video, it wasn't clear, but scrolling down the page, you see:
"Fill this wide, open space with a unique image that represents you best. It's the first thing people see when they visit your timeline."
Assuming that when people click on your name, they go to your timeline, then this appears to replace what we think of as the profile.
It's what Path is trying to capture, but they're such a new service that they don't have the problem of displaying multiple year's worth of data (in their case photos). If people keep using the service, I'm sure they will eventually have to come up with a better way to find the most interesting moments.
Way better than path. This allows a level of interaction and intimacy (if they offer good integration with lists, which conveniently got 10x better last week) that you can't achieve on path.
Have I missed any Spotify - Facebook announcements? I know there's been some buzz on FB live-streaming music - this seems to indicate (in the Apps section) that it will do so using Spotify.
Looks like a Flipboard of your life, plus you can customize its content for different groups of visitors. Glad FB is focusing on design, it looks beautiful.
Does anyone here remember when Facebook had this feature back in 2004/2005? It was a little simpler, but exactly the same idea. They killed it a long time ago, but I guess they just decided to bring it back.
The dude in the video has sure aged and accomplished an impressive amount in Facebook's 7 year history.
Actually I thought that video at the top and what they've done with this introduction/demo page was more interesting than the feature itself.
The high-production value of video at the top reminded me of an apple advert, with beautiful photography and that emotionally charged soundtrack (though the playback quality was a bit off for me?) And then as you scroll down it highlights the different sections in quite an elegant way.
One flaw I saw is that the layout is fixed with and centered, and presumably fixed to be the same width as the actual ui, but they've got some tips in the side bar on the right, which you don't see unless your monitor is wide enough. My window was 1200+ pixels wide and the comments on the side were clipped.
You're right! And there would be intervals when Facebook had no data about you, so it would say "you went into hiding."
As a long-time user, I enjoyed Zuck's history of and return to the profile as a point of creative focus. In the early days, it was the only space to "perform identitively" (in danah boyd's phrasing), so we all sweated over what interests and favorite music to list. Much of that got lost in the switch to the News Feed.
That said, I think many of us will be disturbed to rediscover how much data Facebook has on us--pictures of long-forgotten parties, etc.
Facebook used to be more of a social network for finding people you don't know, and now it's a social network for the people you know.
I really miss searching through profiles. I made a lot of friends randomly that way at my school. I'd click on a band name, a movie, a person or anything, find all the people that liked that band, find out a person was really awesome, hang out with them, etc... Then you could find people at other schools, people that went to your high school, etc... which was also really nice because I went to 8 different schools over 5 years and lost touch with a lot of people. I became better friends with people who used to be just acquaintances. I probably added 2/3 of my friends now on facebook within
Myspace didn't have anything close to that, just name search, and facebook has sort of regressed into that largely in the name of privacy I'm sure.
"Facebook used to be more of a social network for finding people you don't know, and now it's a social network for the people you know."
That's because within the first couple years they figured out that over 90% of their users were primarily using it to connect with people they already knew. (And these were the folks who were both early adopters and college students.)
Also, if you design a social network around meeting new people then that network will cap out relatively quickly and die due to 'triadic implosion'. This is where person A is friends with person B and C. Once person B meets person C, the open triad becomes a closed triad. I forget the exact percent, but once the closed triads are more than a certain percentage the entire social network dies. However, networks that are designed to connect you with your existing friends don't run into this problem.
Also, designing the social network around your existing friends is more conducive to generating lots of new content cheaply and often automatically by using exterior behavioral residue, which is essentially what this new update is all about. Originally Facebook was designed around the existing social science combined with Zuckerberg's intuition, though at this point Facebook is mostly designed around its own proprietary social science that has been created for internal use. In the short run they are maxing out their stickiness before the IPO, though in the long run it wouldn't surprise me if they ultimately undermine their original appeal by straying too far from the basics.
> but once the closed triads are more than a certain percentage the entire social network dies
I'm pretty sure you're misinterpreting a research paper that I'm familiar with. A common measure of network structure is the clustering coefficient, which is the ratio of triads to all possible triads. In real networks, the average clustering coefficient is generally orders of magnitude less than 1%.
Besides, the network is continually growing, and people generally continually meet new people. It's highly unlikely that the FB network is going to stagnate because "everyone already knows each other". At least not for another decade...
I've just experienced how a year or so of hardcore meeting people in college soon turns into years of participating in cliques. I don't think they've neglected the new user experience but to keep you around for long periods of time they have to provide lasting value.
I know you were being a bit sarcastic with the history comment, but you can add things to the timeline. So theoretically you could go back add pictures from way before facebook's launch.
All the companies are robbing each other and sticking a title on it calling features new an revolutionary this is basically Apple's time machine/Auto Save feature on Lion and twitter integration but nicely done in one package actually make me really not want to use it I like the modular approach to social networking and apply this model to many thing in my life
This in short is a great piece of design. Especially coming out of facebook this is amazing (well they now have one of the most talented designers so not that surprising).
However, as a business this is killer and shrewd. Everyone would want to save a log of their life. More app permissions to add to timeline > more auto posts in ticker > more connection for Facebook.
Well played!
Disclosure: I am working on something similar as a place for all the memories of your life (http://momment.com) so the above text comes in view of having actually thought about this problem for months now.
Well it is not the happiest day of my life. I first had this idea when I was looking at these pics on my hard drive and mobile that were years old and yet I had never shared them anywhere because they were just private bits of my life. That is when I read more about it and laid my hands on "Total Recall" and that gave a whole new dimension to the idea.
I am kind of sad actually when I realise that when in say a month from now I launch the product, people would think it was inspired by FB or is atleast something similar.
That said I think merging apps and everything else out there is a bit tricky since what you end up remembering about your life are moments by people and cherishing the experiences. Not by what song you are listening to, what movies you watched and stuff. Or maybe that is just for the emotionally bent folks like me. So we will see how people respond to what is essentially a very natural way to cherish our lives.
How cool is this going to be for kids who grew up with Facebook and their kids and their kids' kids? I would love to have had insight to this level of detail for my ancestors.
Yep. And I wish there was a way to capture everything in my life in this Timeline-like fashion, without any extra effort from me.
The one condition I have, though, is that I don't share it with anyone except someone I explicitly want to share it with. With everything being absolutely private and in my control to carry with me, by default, it would be killer. But this could well be opposite to Facebook's own direction.
All-in-all, this is a rehash of the news feed with a few more controls. But the presentation is really nice.
Cool, it looks interesting. I put my email on the list. I hate hate hate the "sign up your friends now! The more you sign up, the earlier you get in!" thing that shows up after I do. I don't know anything about your site, so I'm not going to go recommend it to anyone.
I can see how the practice started; help spread the word. It just doesn't inspire confidence in me for a site where I'm going to end up posting all sorts of details of my life...
Still, I'll be interested to check it out myself once I can.
Depends on who you mean by 'anyone except someone I explicitly want to share it with'. You will most likely be able to decide which fb users have access to it, but it will nevertheless be accessible (albeit in some condensed form) to advertisers.
I always figure my life is archived thoroughly enough by the e-mails I send and receive for me to reconstruct any period in reasonably high resolution.
Yes. I consider myself a pretty average user for the last 5 or so years on Facebook. I don't have a lot of videos uploaded, but do have a lot of pictures. Facebook compresses those like crazy though, so maybe I have about a gigabyte of data.
At any rate, given that their (as in the company) worth is estimated at more than 200x the people that have access to high speed internet in the world in dollars [1], I think they can probably keep my data, barring bit rot.
note: This assumes that people with dial up don't use Facebook. Probably a valid assumption, or at least that the amount of data a dial up user supplies would not make storage an issue.
Their user base is quickly reaching the point where it is limited to the human population of earth itself (This is an assumption, but they claim 800 active users, which while might be questionable {define "active"} if the true value is around there, they cannot achieve exponential growth). Most people probably only load text, or highly compressed jpg photos. If they can simply turn a profit with a business model that can support the current state, they should be fine.
Especially as storage becomes cheaper and cheaper. I think if something were to happen to Facebook we would see a GeoCities like effort and everything you posted publicly would be backed up.
You could always follow the old-fashion method of keeping a journal. Maybe modernise it a bit and have a digital one with, wait for it, images and videos!
I love keeping a journal and have done so for a fair few years quite diligently and before that, on and off. I have friends who have journals from their grandparents and some even further back.
This IS a great design. What isn't is the new front page with four columns; two that are actively updating content. The simplicity of the timeline looks wonderful, but man that new front page is daunting
I wouldn't place all my bets on that. Remember facebook with profile boxes? Bloat. "Click to see more boxes". Yes, some people may rush to upload their childhood pics, but what happens 3 months later? How many people will go through the hassle of scanning old pictures when they know that facebook may overhaul the profile 1 year later? I 'd rather have a dedicated site for my old photos... And, importantly how often do people read blog archives from 2 years back?
I read a lot of older blog articles... when they are presented in a fashion that makes them accessible. Generally they are not, unless you are searching for keywords.
Keep going with it. I started a similar (short-lived) site a few years ago.
At the time I think I got too caught up on the idea of it being all my own data. You could easily make it pull in data from Facebook (as well as your own data and other places). I think the gain of a dedicated app is that it won't change when the next idea for a profile comes along. Also, you can probably do an even better and more useful job if that is all you are focussed on.
I'm not really impressed with the design, but nothing out of FB has ever impressed me in the slightest. Maybe I'm just predisposed to be biased on this.
Facebook just announced their Timeline feature. The first beautiful interface from Facebook. A product with a lot of feel good elements but a great way for Facebook to integrate themselves even further into the life story of it's millions of users.
Facebook is trying to be a place for social groups to interact online and also for the individual self to be discovered. I don't think both can be done effectively. There's just too much noise on Facebook as it is. I think this feature, really just a visualization of the feed, will just lead to more stalker type behavior.
That's my thought too. This seems like a nice landing page for a profile, but it's trying to do two very different things. It's great for your top items, but the entire timeline history should be a different product.
186 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 200 ms ] threadI suspect it to be somehow a configurable feature or you can always remove those manually.
What is there to explain? Why doesn't your wife let you be the person you are?
Rating how good your past girlfriends were in bed? Describing how you had the best valentines day with a previous girlfriend, and not with your current wife?
People like to believe they're special. Talking too much about ex-gf/bf's is a recipe for disaster. They can't handle the truth!
Do you tell your wife her ass looks big as well? ;)
Wherever you and your wife (partner) deem it to be.
Apparently, it's wherever Facebook decides it is.
What I do know is I roll my eyes every time a piece of mail shows up from her old IRA account with her previous married name on it. I know I would be uncomfortable with a bunch of pictures of old boyfriends and an ex husband mixed in with pictures of us and our son on Facebook. I realize she has a past and that's part of who she is now, but I am perfectly happy to leave some of those things in the past. I don't need or want daily reminders. I don't think she does either.
Given my own feelings about the issue, I choose to treat her the way I want to be treated.
I don't think you should take a condescending tone toward another man's wife in order to prove your bizarre point of principle.
They give you control to add / remove things from the timeline so it probably won't be an issue, I'm just curious how they handle those topics.
So are pilonidal cysts. But you may not want to broadcast all parts of your life to your entire Facebook friend list.
It is also starting to look a lot like what myspace was. Of course, without allowing customization, they could make it look a lot cleaner and meaningful but only time will tell.
However I can see the people who currently use scrapbooks and are on fb, really use it on fb.
As a business decision, I think it's a good one. It will keep some of their customers engaged. I am curious to which demographic will really like the feature.
I am banking that fb thinks that the "popular" users will really use it. By "popular" I mean user(s) in any fb graph, that have the most profile views from other users in that same graph. The users that in a fb graph, people want to keep up with the most.
Those users I think don't necessarily have to be early adopters. They are just popular.
FB as business to grow just has
1.) Maintain Users 2.) Have Current Users use the site more and create more content on it
That is probably why we are seeing more and more features to keep users engaged.
*At least my impression of his vision, given that he often describes Facebook as a utility.
Edit: sorry, what did I say that was so offensive? In every single interview I've seen with Zuckerberg, he talks about Facebook being a utility. How does adding various features (like the timeline) correspond with that at all?
Its one thing to disagree or have different opinion but this guy was not rude, offensive, or ignorant with what he said.
If you don't agree reply with a counterpoint or just don't upvote.
Nobody signs up to FB "because I'll have a single-sign-on identity to use somewhere else"; they sign up to interact with their friends/family/peers, play silly games and post pictures of their cats. Zuckerberg has to constantly throw them a bone to keep them sweet while he goes spreading "Like" buttons and SSO apis through the web.
The way he's managed to eat Google's lunch for five years, by coming to the SSO problem from a completely opposite trajectory, is impressive and quite cunning in its own way. I do believe however that in the long run G+ will probably do to them what IE did to Netscape.
Edit: Sounds like you drag the existing photos to the timeline to add them in the appropriate place. Better than nothing...
"Fill this wide, open space with a unique image that represents you best. It's the first thing people see when they visit your timeline."
Assuming that when people click on your name, they go to your timeline, then this appears to replace what we think of as the profile.
http://www.livestream.com/f8live
The dude in the video has sure aged and accomplished an impressive amount in Facebook's 7 year history.
The high-production value of video at the top reminded me of an apple advert, with beautiful photography and that emotionally charged soundtrack (though the playback quality was a bit off for me?) And then as you scroll down it highlights the different sections in quite an elegant way.
One flaw I saw is that the layout is fixed with and centered, and presumably fixed to be the same width as the actual ui, but they've got some tips in the side bar on the right, which you don't see unless your monitor is wide enough. My window was 1200+ pixels wide and the comments on the side were clipped.
As a long-time user, I enjoyed Zuck's history of and return to the profile as a point of creative focus. In the early days, it was the only space to "perform identitively" (in danah boyd's phrasing), so we all sweated over what interests and favorite music to list. Much of that got lost in the switch to the News Feed.
That said, I think many of us will be disturbed to rediscover how much data Facebook has on us--pictures of long-forgotten parties, etc.
I really miss searching through profiles. I made a lot of friends randomly that way at my school. I'd click on a band name, a movie, a person or anything, find all the people that liked that band, find out a person was really awesome, hang out with them, etc... Then you could find people at other schools, people that went to your high school, etc... which was also really nice because I went to 8 different schools over 5 years and lost touch with a lot of people. I became better friends with people who used to be just acquaintances. I probably added 2/3 of my friends now on facebook within
Myspace didn't have anything close to that, just name search, and facebook has sort of regressed into that largely in the name of privacy I'm sure.
That's because within the first couple years they figured out that over 90% of their users were primarily using it to connect with people they already knew. (And these were the folks who were both early adopters and college students.)
Also, if you design a social network around meeting new people then that network will cap out relatively quickly and die due to 'triadic implosion'. This is where person A is friends with person B and C. Once person B meets person C, the open triad becomes a closed triad. I forget the exact percent, but once the closed triads are more than a certain percentage the entire social network dies. However, networks that are designed to connect you with your existing friends don't run into this problem.
Also, designing the social network around your existing friends is more conducive to generating lots of new content cheaply and often automatically by using exterior behavioral residue, which is essentially what this new update is all about. Originally Facebook was designed around the existing social science combined with Zuckerberg's intuition, though at this point Facebook is mostly designed around its own proprietary social science that has been created for internal use. In the short run they are maxing out their stickiness before the IPO, though in the long run it wouldn't surprise me if they ultimately undermine their original appeal by straying too far from the basics.
I'm pretty sure you're misinterpreting a research paper that I'm familiar with. A common measure of network structure is the clustering coefficient, which is the ratio of triads to all possible triads. In real networks, the average clustering coefficient is generally orders of magnitude less than 1%.
Besides, the network is continually growing, and people generally continually meet new people. It's highly unlikely that the FB network is going to stagnate because "everyone already knows each other". At least not for another decade...
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1150402.1150412&coll=&...
Unfortunately I no longer have a copy of it on my computer to check. This was my understanding though from the last time I looked at it:
http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2007/05/triadic_imp...
"showed a cool movie of a guy's entire life on Facebook's Timeline, but I was nervous they would go to the death part." -Kara Swisher
However, as a business this is killer and shrewd. Everyone would want to save a log of their life. More app permissions to add to timeline > more auto posts in ticker > more connection for Facebook.
Well played!
Disclosure: I am working on something similar as a place for all the memories of your life (http://momment.com) so the above text comes in view of having actually thought about this problem for months now.
I'm curious though, you seem fairly upbeat about FB's entry into the space - does them doing so make you any less enthusiastic about your product?
I am kind of sad actually when I realise that when in say a month from now I launch the product, people would think it was inspired by FB or is atleast something similar.
That said I think merging apps and everything else out there is a bit tricky since what you end up remembering about your life are moments by people and cherishing the experiences. Not by what song you are listening to, what movies you watched and stuff. Or maybe that is just for the emotionally bent folks like me. So we will see how people respond to what is essentially a very natural way to cherish our lives.
The one condition I have, though, is that I don't share it with anyone except someone I explicitly want to share it with. With everything being absolutely private and in my control to carry with me, by default, it would be killer. But this could well be opposite to Facebook's own direction.
All-in-all, this is a rehash of the news feed with a few more controls. But the presentation is really nice.
I can see how the practice started; help spread the word. It just doesn't inspire confidence in me for a site where I'm going to end up posting all sorts of details of my life...
Still, I'll be interested to check it out myself once I can.
note: This assumes that people with dial up don't use Facebook. Probably a valid assumption, or at least that the amount of data a dial up user supplies would not make storage an issue.
Their user base is quickly reaching the point where it is limited to the human population of earth itself (This is an assumption, but they claim 800 active users, which while might be questionable {define "active"} if the true value is around there, they cannot achieve exponential growth). Most people probably only load text, or highly compressed jpg photos. If they can simply turn a profit with a business model that can support the current state, they should be fine.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_...
I love keeping a journal and have done so for a fair few years quite diligently and before that, on and off. I have friends who have journals from their grandparents and some even further back.
At the time I think I got too caught up on the idea of it being all my own data. You could easily make it pull in data from Facebook (as well as your own data and other places). I think the gain of a dedicated app is that it won't change when the next idea for a profile comes along. Also, you can probably do an even better and more useful job if that is all you are focussed on.
Good luck!
http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/freeman/lifestreams.html
Facebook is trying to be a place for social groups to interact online and also for the individual self to be discovered. I don't think both can be done effectively. There's just too much noise on Facebook as it is. I think this feature, really just a visualization of the feed, will just lead to more stalker type behavior.
But if it were that detailed, I wouldn't want it made public.
Can we timeline privately?