Will Facebook Timeline Initiate Another Round of Grumbling?

Facebook Changes Inspire More Grumbling. (The New York Times, 10/29/2011)

Excerpt:  The new Facebook Timeline view is still in private testing; you, the public, won’t get to see it for a couple more weeks. For now, it’s optional. Eventually, it will replace your existing Profile page — thus the griping. But this time, change is good.

In essence, it’s a timeline of your life, depicted on a vertically scrolling page. Now is at the top; your birth is at the bottom. Facebook generates it automatically, using your recent news and life events to populate it; the farther back you go in time, the more Facebook condenses events. You can manually expand or compress various phases of your life, and you can manually add or remove events. (That’s fortunate. Otherwise, the entire period before you joined Facebook would be a big boring blank.)

Because the Timeline displays photos alongside the news and events of your life, it can eventually become a rich visual record of your life — or at least the parts you want to make public.

Now, if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t see the appeal of Facebook in the first place — “Why on earth would I want to make the intimate details of my life public on the Internet!?” — then the Timeline will only amplify your bafflement.