Facebook Timeline
facebook.com
facebook.com
For those that think this is genuinely going to be a good and popular thing, could you explain why? You probably all know much better than me, so I am interested to hear why people think this'll be popular (which they obviously do, looking at every other comment here!)
I guess it could be useful to turn Facebook into a dating site - is that the bit I'm missing?
Edit: To downvoters: I'm more than happy to accept I'm wrong, I'd just like to know why I am. Cheers.
It seems like it would be a good way for these people who know a little bit about me to quickly learn a little more about me.
Any new feature has to be a good thing though, I didn't express that clearly (at all?) in my original comment.
Though I disagree that any new feature is a good thing :P
"I had a wonderful time at Yellowsto--"
"I know."
I dunno, in my experience OKCupid profiles (the best available online dating site the last time I was single) were just a thin veneer of bullshit designed to sell only the best qualities. Nothing wrong with that per se but I never felt like I learned anything real about a person other than a few facts sprinkled in here and there.
The same could be said about meeting people in real life.
It really makes sense to me... When you get down to the "show more" link at the end of a friend's profile what you really want is a summary of the important stuff beyond that. It actually reminds me of when you got the bottom of your feed on friendfeed and were presented with a "best of day" link.
I'm wondering why my events are visible to the public though.
As a current user of the timeline feature (it is available to Facebook developers), I am amazed and almost creeped out about how easy it is for me to see back to the very day that I joined Facebook, and to easily review all my interactions since then. I can assure that you will be too.
One of Hank Hill's employees shows up on his doorstep demanding he hang out, but Hank refuses to mix work and personal relationships.
Just thought I'd share :P
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.
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!
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
You spend an afternoon "scrapbooking" in real life, and you get something that your grand-grandsons might, one day, inherit and read in awe.
You spend an afternoon scrapbooking on FB, and in ten years FB goes bust or whatever (Geocities, anyone?), and you've got nothing.
I guess the real test will be my wife -- she loves scrapbooking.
(this, and the first time I went through the presentation my brain was screaming MYSPACE really, really loud.)
For example, a while back they managed to lose parts of my profile (something to do with "pages" I think), and I used to be part of a group for my year at high school which, as far as I can tell, has silently vanished.
Nobody is stopping people from continuing to scrapbook, but let's face it, not many people do that anyway (I know that I don't). Now, with 0 additional effort on the user's part, he or she will have a digital scrapbook. I think that's pretty cool.
*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.
I 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.
Apps appear to be more visible in this design, as well as having more of a purpose. Perhaps part of the motivation of this design was to encourage developers to make use of the Facebook platform.
It may be a good opportunity for web apps to make their users more public about their choice of apps. While apps can currently publish to a user's wall, I prevent this from happening because it seems spammy and pointless, but I wouldn't have an issue with an app having a dedicated space on my profile where it displays specific information.
The majority of social networks and social sharing sites are obsessed with the now. This stemmed from Facebook and Twitter pioneering the UI with the timeline format. However, try to go back really far in any timeline, and you'll usually be greeted with a wall.
Timeline will hopefully make Facebook (and other sites) realize the potential there is in browsing through and curating older content. Sure, people will still be obsessed with the newest stuff, but at least there will be a way to open up the time horizon a bit and reflect on the forest.
As the FB generation grows up to become grandparents, it'll be fascinating for the grandkids to actually see a complete and browsable timeline of their grandparents. Just imagine if you had that today.
Sidenote 1: FB is now starting to encroach on 1000memories's space.
Sidenote 2: FB should really sell automatically generated (but high quality) timeline storybooks. Parents and relatives would go crazy for that.
Would you please care explaining why?
Of course, I have only seen the pitch at f8 but I haven't used the product yet so right now I think exactly what Facebook wants me to think :)
What comes next? Genealogical charts? Medical records? That's not how I want to use Facebook.
Edit: Sounds like you drag the existing photos to the timeline to add them in the appropriate place. Better than nothing...
For those who don't know, Felton is a graphic designer hired in April [http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663718/facebook-hires-infograph... for more info].
The simple graphical layout of Timeline in the preview page reminds me of MySpace. But given how Felton is a big part of this. Facebook's designs have largely ebbed and flowed, but this looks like a cool concept and Felton's involvement has me excited.
Those years of updates and photos on the timeline are data that only Facebook has. It's a unique asset and they're putting it front and center.
If people like the timeline a lot it will be an enormous barrier to entry for competing social networks.
I'm a Facebook developer and followed these instructions from none other than TechCrunch to get my timeline profile up and running.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/22/how-to-enable-facebook-time...
In any case, I thought the Bing Maps integration is a pretty significant item to note the growing competition between Facebook and Google on the social scene.
If someone spent a few minutes a day also annotating pictures and videos then this would be a good resource for remembering the past.
Hopefully Google Takeout exporting facility will soon also provide download ZIPs for auto-upload materials.
What happened to catching an old buddy after ages, in real life, and getting to hear each others story over a cup of coffee or dinner table. I would always prefer that to getting to know every other detail about my friends living far away, throwing every little detail of their life at me, every 10 minutes.
Also I loved how all his stuff only had three likes. He must have pricks for friends I only a handful of people liked his daughter saying 'dada' ;)
It provides a degree of justification for harvesting personal data - but perhaps negates the fact that this data is useful to Facebook as well. Smoke and mirrors ...
Soon they will begin to bet against their own market.
But if it were that detailed, I wouldn't want it made public.
Can we timeline privately?
Please cap your designs at 1000 pixels.
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.