(I’ve Had) The Time(line) of My Life
December 25, 2011
This past Christmas Eve, when many people around the world were tracking the timeline of Santa Claus’s journey around the globe delivering toys (with the help of NORAD), I launched the Timeline version of my Facebook profile.
What is Facebook Timeline? According to a Mashable article:
“Facebook Timeline changes the default profile from a list of your most recent updates to a complete summary of your entire life since birth. It includes photos, videos, status updates and locations you have visited. The new Facebook profile is divided into two main columns, with a line down the middle representing the passage of time.”
The video below from Facebook provides a comprehensive instructional overview of this compelling new feature:
I activated the new profile design (which you can do by visiting https://www.facebook.com/about/timeline and selecting the option at the bottom of the page) on December 17th after it became widely available to the public on December 15th.
I was immediately impressed at the ease with which I could view the totality of my Facebook experience (and my life prior to Facebook), from birth (at the bottom) to present day (at the top).
In the week that followed I carefully reviewed my activity, making sure to delete (or hide from my timeline) those that seemed irrelevant while enjoying those posts of significance to me. It was a fairly intuitive process, but if you find yourself confused, there is a robust Help Center available.
So far I am impressed and intrigued with Timeline. It represents Facebook’s unique vision to make it the hub of our digital lives. With the introduction of Timeline, Facebook seems to now be less about faces than it does about our lives in total. Perhaps it should rebrand itself as LifeBook?
I encourage you to activate your own timeline: in doing so you will allow your friends and colleagues to learn more about you, but more interestingly, you will learn more about yourself.
Who knows, you might just have the time(line) of your life!
[...] for certain topics, as in the case of my recent blog post, (I’ve Had) The Time(line) of My Life, I wanted to include a video that was only available on Facebook. Doing so wasn’t nearly as [...]