As well as announcing Music integration with Spotify, Facebook announced a brand new Profile Page layout called ‘Timeline’ today at their f8 event.
Creator of Facebook Mark “The Zuck” Zuckerberg took to the stage to announce Timeline and give us an idea of what it’s about.
The idea of ‘Timeline’ is to show everything you’ve ever done on Facebook on your profile page, in chronological order – that’s status updates, photos uploaded, links posted and more.
Most recent updates and additions are at the top and have the most detail attached to them, whereas the further you go back in time and down your Timeline, the less detail is added to each update or post.
This is the first time Facebook have properly changed the Profile page layout since around 2008, and it looks like a huge change.
Mark Zuckerberg explained Timeline as “a new way to explain who you are”. “This is exactly how you want to browse through time” he went on to add.
Timeline allows any media and apps associated with your profile to be embedded, so songs, videos, apps and links can be viewed easily on a profile without the need to leave the page.
Perhaps the strangest part of the change is the top of the page – the profile picture. You can now add a ‘cover’ image to your Timeline, which spans almost the width of the page, with your profile picture sitting in a small square to the bottom left of this. The ‘cover’ aspect really emphasises the fact that Facebook want this feature to make your Profile Timeline like a ‘book’.
To the right of your ‘cover’ is a timeline of months, simply click a month to see what you did on Facebook during that time. Below the cover is your recent activity and wall, split into two sides. Through testing it out briefly, we have to say we’re big fans already. The layout looks so much less cluttered, so much more easy to navigate and up to date.
Facebook Timeline is only available to developers right now, but there is a way for anyone to get it working. We’re putting together a guide for you which should be up tomorrow morning, check back to find out how to test drive Timeline!