Facebook and Timeline: Is it Just an Upscale MySpace?
If you haven’t heard, Facebook has a new user interface – one that they will be calling timeline (and for for that they are getting sued). It is something that is totally different from what the site looks like today.
Instead of have a stream of things that just fall “into outer space” once they reach the bottom of the wall posts, timeline kind of compartmentalizes your life, and gives a summary of your life as time goes on. The further back in time you go the more Timeline will summarize the “important” types of information it can give you.
sing timeline for quite some time now (if you want to learn it yourself you can easily activate the system by following these directions), and at first I was pretty amazed at what these programmers were able to do with a computer screen, and what they were able to do with user activity all the while keeping companies in mind as well as all of the app integration completely (and even more in some cases) relevant (just like Facebook and Spotify’s new agreements for example).
The site is very impressive at first glance and it allows for a lot of awesome new features. Things are categorized very nicely. It shows what music you have been listening to, if you have gone for three mile runs lately, what you have been cooking – basically anything that you feel like feeding it, there is an app that can keep track of it for you.
There is also a set of action items that you can post onto your timeline (your new and improved wall). There are five different “areas of your life” that Facebook feels you should be able to add to your timeline. These areas include:
- Work and Education
- Family and Relationships
- Living
- Health and Wellness
- Milestones and Experiences
For instance, in milestones and achievements you can…
- Add a hobby
- Say you learned things, like a language, an instrument
- Got a piercing or a tattoo
- Traveled somewhere
- Had a first “Word,” “Kiss,” or something else of the like
Each category of your life has different options, and yet each category of your life also allows you to customize some event that happened to you in your life.
What is the main difference between Timelines platform and the Facebook “Wall”?
Well what I see as the main difference (so far) is that the interaction of people will most likely be taken away from the wall. It will jump onto other interfaces, such as photos, app activity, and other places that really haven’t been defined yet. Just as the status update brought more comments to the statuses rather than the actual wall, timeline will once again change how user activity is done on Facebook. Except this time it will be much more dramatic.
Now, all of these features are very cool and all, Facebook is definitely doing its job when it comes to making their programmers work on really hard things that make sense in theory – but not in the real world -or at least not for me.
I recently had a birthday, you know, the day that everybody wishes you happy birthday on Facebook and your wall fills up all the way up. Now, this single event, of people posting on your walls at a very high amount of volume in one day looks very, very awkward on Timeline.
In fact I think it might be what Sean Parker was saying when he said that Facebook’s Power users have gone to Google Plus and Twitter. Timeline isn’t suited for tons of use, and in fact, it really isn’t suited for communication at all – I figure Facebook’s new and always changing way of instant messaging as well as regular messaging will suffice for that.
What Facebook’s new creation looks like, is a very upscale version MySpace to me. It’s all about bulking up this “mirror of your online self” as Chris Poole calls Facebook and Google’s idea of social networking. It looks at a huge attempt at defining yourself through apps, or what you add to this page. They even want you to go back in time (via your timeline) and add things (like pictures of when you are born and stuff like that).
No you can’t add background images, or change the color of your page (however you can add a cover which is pretty much the same thing), and no there isn’t a top 8 list of friends, but Facebook’s timeline is every bit as “emo” as MySpace was considered. One advantage that Facebook has: – 800 million + users. Let’s see if that can hold up or get better once Timelines gets launched.
This article was written by Philip Russell. Philip helps to run and maintain www.inetzeal.net, an Internet marketing company that provides SEO services. He enjoys writing articles about SEO and SEM in his spare time.
Just got your tweet, clicked through to this article, and really was looking forward to reading it. Honestly the black background and red/gray hurt my eyes, not kidding I literally couldn’t look at the screen on my macbook. You don’t have to approve this comment, but I’d consider changing CSS to have a more user friendly color scheme! Just a tip (being honest) so realize that. Appreciate you following on Twitter, you can take/leave the suggestion…