Obvious, real world example: I've been dreading Timeline because I know the only high-resolution pictures of me on Facebook (that I've either uploaded myself or been tagged in) all include my ex-girlfriend, so I'll need to take a different picture for the header image.<p>I know how absurd that may sound, but Timeline, especially taken long-scale, could have a major impact on how we perceive our lives and ourselves because of how impossible it will be to escape from the past without painstakingly filtering and removing posts and pictures.<p>The obvious response, of course: "if you don't want permanence, don't upload in the first place." And this will be something I keep in mind, unless Facebook adds features to easily prune content from Timeline. But it's ridiculous that I should need to be <i>that</i> concerned about every pithy status I decide to post, not because of its contents in the present, but how they could be perceived in the future by myself and others.
If you don't want your past on the timeline, remove it. It's that simple. This isn't adding any new functionality to Facebook, it's just presenting it differently.<p>Personally, I love how easy the timeline makes it to jump back to my freshman year of college. I can see how much I've changed as a person for better or worse. It's like an excellent scrapbook of my life and I'm happy to have it.
Timeline is not annoying. Personal past is annoying. Timeline makes it easier to dig those stuffs out of the grave.<p>I love timeline. It is my life-log. I don't share everything publicly. I share it with Only Me/Close Friends/Family. All my old photologs are now migrated to facebook, with very limited Visibility.<p>Facebook photo management tools still suck. You could easily take a copy of your data from facebook (<a href="https://www.facebook.com/settings" rel="nofollow">https://www.facebook.com/settings</a> -> Download a copy of your data), but there is no easy way to delete them.
The author fails to see that people exist in a reality where stuff like the Facebook Timeline is just another fact of life, and the facebook profile is just a useful component of getting to know someone. That is, I would imagine that most people are familiar enough with the mechanics of social networks to be capable of seeing beyond random old posts on Facebook when learning about a person.
Why is it that people will hold against you an immature act that you did years ago, ignoring the fact that people tend to mature as they age?<p>Perhaps the timeline will help overcome this tendency. By making everyone's history more visible, maybe people will become less sensitive to seeing past examples of immaturity and therefore weigh them less when making judgements about a person.
My problem with the Timeline is that I refuse to give Facebook any more information than they already have on my life. I can't stand when people talk about how they went back in time on their Timeline, grooming it with important life events and baby photos. Just another vector to sell us more stuff, I guess.
My only interest in Facebook is keeping in touch with old friends and having a way to remind either myself or others to reach out and say hello.<p>If it wasn't for e-mails (gmail), I would had never re-connected with some people on Facebook. The interface is an ice breaker and a way to less awkwardly contact someone you haven't spoken to in years. Or quickly see how someone is doing.<p>Most of what I want is simple and fundamental. It doesn't require me giving a never-ending marketing survey on my interests. My desired service is connectivity with a simple interface that can largely exist off my e-mail contacts. I don't see why a $75 billion company is needed to do this.
What I would love to see on Facebook is a way for me to make all non-starred posts older than X private. That way I can post lots of stuff and have the recent timeline filled with all sorts of crap which gives an impression of me, now, but it also allows me to hide all the old and only bring out the highlights, the things I actively want to be visible.<p>The problem is that the things I want to be visible changes with time, so I can't just not post it in the first place, because what seems perfectly fine today may be really bad a few years from now, and I can't know that ahead of time. And there really is no way to delete everything as far as I know.
I don't have Timeline yet, for some reason, but I don't think it's stupid because you get to be reminded of stuff you posted and wrote years ago. That's just you a few years ago. Part of living here is about not being the same person now as you were five years ago.<p>Why I think it's stupid is the damn layout. I used to be able to linearly scroll back to someone's recent history to check back what s/he said or posted. Now it's all sort of mixed up in a horrifically heavy layout that slows down tablets and less powered machines, and requires a large screen to be viewed properly.
I went through all all posts manually and marked them with "only me" as custom privacy and "hide from timeline". What I now need is a tool that I can run on a monthly basis to automatically do this for any content older than a month.<p>I don't mind making inane posts on Facebook which friends can comment on as that post shows up in their newsfeed, but once enough time has passed for it to fall off the newsfeed then as far as I'm concerned it can be permanently deleted.<p>P.S. I've started referring to logical deletes as "Facebook deletes" in work.
I think this is just changing the way the younger 'facebook' generation think, posting becomes less personal and more about how you like to be perceived. Those of us that grew up without facebook embraced it as a nice way to share personal items with our friends.<p>Now it seems more of a PR stream, people staging photos for facebook, carefully updating status's knowing that a wider audience can see.<p>For me timeline represents facebooks focus on a single identity that you control, rather than representing who you actually are.
I really don't get the premise of this post. If someone wanted to dig in to my life via my Facebook account, he or she could have done earlier also. It would have taken many more clicks though. Timeline is another way of presenting the data.<p>The problem is with Facebook's privacy controls and I think they have improved from the rock bottom that they had reached. Timeline will change our behavior on Facebook and that is something the News Feed also did. I don't see how that is necessarily bad.
I too dont like FBs Timeline. Its total Mess. Many other Timelines don't get it either. Timekiwi to some extent is good. I have some ideas for a better timeline. If any hacker is willing to cowork, I can share my ideas to build the Best Timeline.
No, people did not get used to the new News Feed. We just got tired of whining about it on a regular basis because Facebook will never change it back. Every one of my friends (across all demographics) still hate it very much.
As far as deleting your past, my sister does it all the time. I haven't asked her how, but every couple weeks she wipes out her entire wall without anything else changing. There must be tools for it.
I dislike Timeline for three reasons.<p>- When some of my friends' Timelines open, it takes ages for it to load and then every other program I might have open on my laptop drags, if I leave that tab open
- It is far more difficult to follow the "timeline" even for recent postings, that often you can miss interesting items
- I can't hide or reduce to a select group, only delete postings<p>Which is why I haven't implemented and hate when I see it on other's profiles.
Just had my first look at the Timeline. As part of my "I'm leaving Facebook" project, I've been manually deleting every single submission I've made on Facebook, going back about 5 years. When I finally delete my account, there will be nothing left. This has taken awhile, because it is such a pain that I can only do a short period of time at a time.<p>However, Timeline actually makes this a lot easier. I can click on 2008 and then see everything in 2008 and delete it all right from the timeline.<p>The reason I'm deleting it all is because Facebook asks for confirmation of "Delete this post?" for every single one. If I say yes, and they remove it from view, I have, as far as I'm concerned, both a moral and legal right to believe it is actually deleted from their database. Otherwise "delete this post?" would be a fraudulent offer.<p>Thus, if any information that I've deleted shows up in the future, I will have a claim against them. (Whether its practical to press that claim or not, I don't know. I just want them to be obligated to have deleted it because their software made the promise that they were.)