Diving into Facebook Timeline's UI | Hacker News Reader

Diving into Facebook Timeline's UI

arnorhs.com

24 pointsarnorhs12 comments

How do I enable timeline for my profile?

This is frustrating because I'm actually a facebook developer who would actually like to look at ways of incorporating this into my project.

I know there was a workaround for a while that involved signing up as a dev to get in on the preview.

le sigh

Go to http://www.facebook.com/about/timeline and click "sign me up" at the bottom right

It's greyed out for me :(

This page, like several other parts of Facebook, is completely inoperable for me. Something in the page dies before it gets to the <body> tag.

This is perhaps irrelevant to the topic, but it's really frustrating that there's basically no way for me to do anything about this. I've waded through their highly unhelpful help pages to submit bug reports for all the things I've found not to work, but this has been the case for months.

I assume that I managed to be a part of an A/B test that causes some really inoperable things to happen? Regardless, it sort of reinforces my negative opinions of Facebook engineering when something can consistently break for me to the point that it renders no page.

Usually when people say stuff like this, I assume they're clueless and have borked their browser somehow and simply need to turn off some add ons and clear their cache, etc. However, I have all sorts of problems with Facebook also. Sometimes photos are suddenly 'unavailable', when it's not. When I click on a search, it's like their JS thinks the page successfully changed, but it hasn't changed the visible content and it will stay on that page forever. Now and then, after I sign in every action I take greets me with a popup saying 'Log in to continue' and I can't do anything (signing in again doesn't solve it). If I, someone highly tech savvy, have these problems I can only imagine how confused the public is.

I've been trying to submit a bug with photo albums thumbnails disappearing while you upload from your iphone (seems to be some kind of memory problem or redraw not updating) and some suggestions for the UI/UX (if you choose the wrong image to upload on your phone it takes 5 taps to choose another image rather than 2 taps) but I can't find a page anywhere to send in a bug report or ask for a UI change.

Wait, is Facebook really rolling it out? I don't know anyone that has it that hasn't gone through the developer hoops to get it. Didn't they say they were going to roll it out for everyone in October or something?

Why the delay?

(Aside from the fact that it's the creepiest thing they've ever made)

My app's referrers from the timeline have grown from a really really small # to only a really small #, so I think it is in fact gradually being rolled out, but I'm not sure.

It's weird that they don't show the mini icons by default next to the text in the main profile links. They do a little animation to show them when you hit the down arrow to show more.

That could solve that problemo.

Nice write-up. I think it could be a pretty interesting thing for people that don't interact via status updates very often, like me. Can you set permissions on the timeline per user/group?

I really dislike the Timeline UI. I've had it on my profile for a few weeks now and find it impossible to parse and unenjoyable to read.

Please let me know if there's you think there is something that the article misses.

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