Mark Zuckerberg unveils Timeline during F8 conference
Ready or not, here they come.
On the same week Facebook introduced new features like the “ticker” and changed its news feed, CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled Facebook’s new music initiative and other entertainment features to its 800 million active users during the F8 conference in San Francisco Thursday.
The biggest change will come to profile pages, which will now transform into what Facebook calls the Timeline—a scrapbook of a user’s Facebook life ending with the day the page was “born.”
Timeline is exactly what it sounds like: Instead of clicking the button below to check out old updates, users can scroll down all the way to the bottom, as they view old updates. Timeline starts with recent updates and then summarizes the rest of your life.
“It’s much nicer than anything we have today,” said a giddy Zuckerberg.
Want to check out what you did in 2007? Just click the year on the right of your Timeline and Facebook automatically scrolls down to the year you want. It also gives people the ability to add content back in time. Say you have a graduation picture from 2007; you can go back in time and upload a photo.
The profile page will be totally remolded—something Facebook tends to do yearly, though not to this extent.
Looking to make profile pages more visually appealing, users will have a cover photo to go along with their profile picture. The cover image will dominate the top of the page, which is all part of helping Facebook users “express” who they are, Zuckerberg said.
Facebook unveils new features at F8 Conference on Thursday
According to the Facebook blog, 99 percent of stories shared vanish over time. With the Timeline, people will no longer have to hit “Older Posts” to check out old updates, because it will all be there, telling your life story.
As we’ve seen this week, Facebook users are getting exhausted with all the new changes, frustrating people who feel like they have to constantly learn something new.
Among the other features is Facebook’s new music initiative, with the help of Spotify and other music companies, which falls under their new Open Graph app.
Spotify users can connect with Facebook to listen and share music with friends. Songs that people listen to will also show up on their Timeline, developing a sort of personal playlist.
Facebook is also partnering with entertainment companies like Netflix and Hulu, allowing users to watch TV shows and movies straight from Facebook. The new ticker on the right corner of the news feed will display shows or movies people are watching, attracting people to shows they might have never been interested in.
If you’re exhausted just reading about it, then you better brace yourself for a lot of change, because Zuckerberg said the Timeline will be rolled out in the next few weeks.
“It’s really cool,” he said, “it’s real fun and easy to fill out your timeline.”
We’ll see.
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