I signed up on Facebook back in 2004, mere months after Zuckerberg launched the social network at Harvard. At the time, the network was a hit amongst college campuses and was not yet available to the public. Since then, the user interface has gone through more looks and changes than Lady Gaga sees in a good month.
Yesterday, Facebook’s new “Timeline” interface was unveiled at the annual f8 developer conference, and although the changes won’t be rolled out for a few weeks, developers can take a look at it now. So can regular users, by following a few steps provided by TechCrunch. We actually don’t suggest enabling Timeline right away, but here are a couple of interesting features you should know about it.
(MORE: Reveal More, Consume More: Facebook’s Big Changes)
Timeline, frankly, doesn’t feel like the Facebook you know and love. It feels like a giant album cover of your life put on display (which also explains why you can add a “cover photo” to your profile). Frankly, it’s an attractive and somewhat radical interface. With a two-column stream of updates, this redesign utilizes more space than ever before.
Scrolling is reduced to a minimum, and the upper right-hand corner presents a neat little timeline since you’ve joined. Clicking on 2006, for instance, brings me straight back to college. It’s also possible to get even more granular, sorting events by specific months.
Not unlike previous designs, the information section—where I state my occupation along with where I eat, live and breathe—fills the page, with blocks of content to segregate different types of data. There’s really not too much to comment on, other than the fact that it sort of looks a bit clunky compared to the rest of the makeover.
(MORE: Two Minute Video: Quick Look at the New Facebook Interface)
Perhaps a key feature of Facebook’s Timeline is the ability to go back and add important events that happened in your life. For example, it’s possible to add that you went traveling back in 2008, that you broke your leg in 2010, and that you got engaged last month. Talk about time traveling and adding some revisionist history to your life.
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