Seems to me the much more likely scenario is that Timeline was created to give a better (and prettier) interface for users to access the information posted to facebook - not some kind of secret psychological advertising conspiracy.
He got women to smoke by calling them 'freedom torches' and orchestrating high society women to light cigarettes in a demonstration for suffrage.
He facilitated the modern retail industry by shifting American behavior from a 'need-based' consumer to a 'want-based' consumer.
There are billions of dollars being spent to increase the effectiveness of advertising and I wouldn't be surprised if one of the world's biggest advertiser used subtle tactics to achieve this aim.
Neuromarketing is a pretty standard practice now, I don't think any of this is controversial.
I would really, really appreciate it if someone could explain to me why we ever applied the term "conspiracy theory" to the common-sense assumption that a for-profit company's business decisions are motivated by (gasp, shock) profit.
Companies that become entirely about perpetuating their own existence, where the means of profiting becomes their purpose, seem to use nasty business practices and power to ruin competition rather than compete on product quality. They usually stagnate, alienate their users and only maintain market share by ensuring users have no other choice. I don't think this method is a good long term solution and from my perspective I don't think Facebook or Google are acting in this way (at least for now).
We justify advertising because so many of the products and companies we love are built on it, plain and simple. Advertising is "good" in the same sense that pollution is good: in a world without it, much of what we love wouldn't exist. The assumption that Google or Facebook ad revenue reflects value delivered to their users is extremely, extremely dubious, and I don't even see a prima facie case for it. When a rational actor spends money, that's good evidence that it is receiving value, but nobody would model a Facebook user making purchases as a rational actor. If they did, the ads would look rather different. So what basis do we have for saying that effective ads benefit users, except as a way of funding the service by extracting payment from users' attention budgets instead of from their bank accounts?
At one time, people loved seeing smokestacks belching smoke because that meant prosperity, jobs, and abundance. On HN, I think we feel the same way about ads. More effective ads on the web means more prosperity, more employment, and more products for us to enjoy.
Both Google and Facebook were born out of an interest to improve the world and solve a problem
I give credit to Google for having a corporate culture that reflects its founders, but in the long run, survival and profit are more fundamental in a corporation's hierarchy of needs. With Google we probably won't know exactly when it becomes just like AT&T or GM or any other large corporation; we'll recognize it sometime after the fact. Even in their current state, they're still a business with accountants, investors, and quarterly statements. The people who work there are ambitious and want to buy nice stuff; they get goals and reviews and promotions. All the elements that cause corporations to operate at a much lower moral level than the people they're made of are present. The corporate culture can only hold those forces back for so long.
As for Facebook, when did people start regarding them as a benevolent, well-intentioned company (distinct from their great product which really does improve the world?) I knew they were out to change the world and shape the future, but it seemed like improving the world happened as a side effect.
They usually stagnate, alienate their users and only maintain market share by ensuring users have no other choice.
First, you're describing the corporations that emerged victorious from previous great changes; don't underestimate how dominant that behavior can be. Someday, long after Google's "not evil" ethic is no longer an asset they have to lose, standard corporate tactics will be the best way for them to deliver shareholder value. And the shareholders will get their value. Second, it sounds like you're describing Facebook right now. I have Diaspora and Google+ accounts, but of course Facebook is the one I check all the time. Facebook can do almost anything to me and not lose me as a customer, for the simple reason that current social networks don't interoperate and therefore social networking accounts aren't portable from one provider to another in any meaningful way.
EDIT (abusing the edit function to reply): I agree with you that calling Facebook or any other company "malevolent" is incorrect. I think it's better to say that sometimes a company's interests are aligned with the interests of their users, and sometimes they aren't. I also agree that it looks like Google's and even Facebook's interests are aligned with their users' interests in many ways. However, that will change someday, and the very smart guys at Google and Facebook will start acting on that change of interest before we even recognize it.
Also, I really don't see it as them "tricking" us. They aren't doing anything deceitful or morally wrong. They're just doing their job, which is to deliver profitable ad clicks to the advertisers who pay them. We don't have to pretend that they're doing it out of the goodness of their hearts (or that their advertising is good for us) in order to respect what they do and appreciate the service they provide.
As far as Google and Facebook I think they recognize that they're better off taking care of their users for long term success. I suppose you could argue this is only a temporary stance based on company culture, but I don't know if I'd agree with it.
Facebook takes a lot of heat and is often talked about on HN as this malevolent advertising company (privacy be damned), but to me this criticism always seemed overblown. I've always personally viewed them as actually trying to do what they say they're trying to accomplish. As far as the last point about Facebook being dominant, just because a company is dominant doesn't mean they're entirely about perpetuating their own existence. Facebook still rapidly makes changes and improves their platform, they also didn't do anything anti-competitive to try and destroy Google+ or Diaspora (I think Mark even donated to Diaspora).
This is all background to why I think the OP's article is unlikely. I think these companies build new features to keep their users happy and using their site, not design new features with the main purpose of secretly tricking them into more advertising. It isn't all about profit.
I can't imagine a universe in which they aren't placing at least some weight on the standard suite of "engagement" metrics. If that is the case, then they're seeking to increase the amount of time you spend on the site, the number of pages you view, the number of ads you see (and click), the frequency with which you scroll below the cut and so on.
Creating an interface that provides fast, easy access to the most relevant information means that most of your core metrics get worse. Facebook would have to be exceptionally smart and exceptionally far-sighted for their interface to do anything but get worse. They would need a corporate culture that is either centralised and vision-led, or utterly indifferent to short-term measures of engagement and profitability. Zuckerberg is a smart man, but he's not a Steve Jobs or a Larry Page.
I don't think it takes that much intuition to realize that treating your users well and building something for them will be better in the long run.
It creates a badly jumbled view of the information I was really hoping to see -- what's going on with me and my friends? I can handle a straight chronological list very easily.
This is an interesting answer to the question 'why didn't they stick with the simplest approach?'
For that, you want to highlight a specific picture or event, but still have little anecdotes sprinkled here and there. They want you to go through the Timeline like you'd go through a photo album where you'd have a mix of the big events (graduation, marriage, births, etc.) with the little things, so that you can hear "oh, remember that one? When we went to Disneyland and you fell in the pool…", "you were so mad at him that day! Look at what you wrote on your wall…", etc.
Not having just a list makes it a bit more interesting to peruse. It's like going through a shoebox of photos and souvenirs, spread them out and you see some things, not others… I'm not saying they've nailed it, but it's a first version of it and it's an interesting experiment. It's hard to make an interesting photo album by hand, it's even harder to make something semi-automated.
As as side-note: The new timeline is why I quit FaceBook in December.
I find that interesting since I personally rarely see people's profiles or timelines.
Use the EXIF timestamp of when each photo was taken. Make a web page for each month, and group photos together by day to make it easy to skim through. Limit the number of photos shown on this page for any given day (put the rest on their own page) and you've automatically got variety. With those two simple organizational steps, viewers of the photo collection are set up for success in quickly finding photos that interest them, assuming there are some.
That's what your feed (i.e. the "main" page) is for, right?
The timeline is for when you want to look at just one person's activity... it's basically "WHERE user = 'xyz' ORDER BY entry_date DESC".
About the only thing I use FB now for is the feed, but then Twitter serves the same function w/ better control over who I want to follow.