The new “Timeline” profile page won’t roll out to all Facebook users until December 24th, but you can now opt in to the new page, and unlike the last profile page revision, this isn’t just a minor layout change. Not only can you now easily see feed items from years in the past, but you can also use “life events”, with which you can add important events from your life into your timeline; these range from accomplishments like “weight loss” and “new job” to long-past experiences like “first word” and “first kiss”.
Unfortunately, life events aren’t particularly intuitive to add. The interface for adding them is beautifully polished, as is the rest of the Timeline, something we’ve come to expect of the Facebook team and their penchant for AJAX; the issue is with having so many options. I have strong doubts that a Facebook user is going to go through the options in the new life events menu to find the most accurate option and then input details and photographs unless it’s a very important event - like the birth of a child, which is one of the options.
There’s also the question of why users should be adding life events. Is this some sort of advertising ploy, so that piano tutors can target advertisements at users who have handily submitted a form saying they’re now learning the piano? Or are we expected to believe that users are adding life events for the benefit of their friends? It seems like either enabling advertisers to gain extra information on you, or for your less close friends to stalk the history of your entire life. Neither are appealing prospects.
From a technical perspective, life events is a neat addition, and they even look gorgeous in the Timeline - but is there any value to adding them? Not particularly. Tagging a friend in an old memory might facilitate a brief moment of indulgence in nostalgia, but other than that you’re just enabling Facebook to track more of your personal information, now in both the past as well as the present. “Questions” never really succeeded in replacing status updates, and I highly doubt “life events” will find more traction.
I must say that I am very sceptical about this new addition to FB: where is the privacy? do I really want people to know about my past? Important events are mine to keep and not to share if I dont want to… I hope that there is a button that i can turn off to keep some privacy!!!
18th December 2011, 1:21 AM - reply - report
I think it’s time to cancel my Facebook account.
18th December 2011, 4:57 AM - reply - report
Like “Places”, life events only appear in your Timeline if you add them manually, so this shouldn’t be a concern; the concern is in why Facebook is encouraging its users to add them.
18th December 2011, 8:11 PM - reply - report
I hate that timeline!
23rd December 2011, 10:41 AM - reply - report