Facebook introduced the social media feature known as Facebook Timeline in September 2011 and made it available to all users in February 2012.
Facebook timeline creates a more visually complete profile by combining a user’s Facebook Wall and Profile into one page. Reverse-chronological details of a user’s Facebook history are provided by year along with significant life events like birthdays, weddings, and other milestones.
Instead of archiving user data, Timeline reorganizes it for display. Viewing out-of-date events, photos, and comments was more difficult or impossible in earlier iterations of Facebook.
please read on for more detailed information.
Table of Contents
What Is The Facebook Timeline?
Timeline was initially an optional feature, but in February 2012, Facebook started rolling out the update to all users. As with all Facebook changes, the introduction of Timeline sparked user privacy concerns, but Facebook insists that the implementation has no impact on privacy settings and that users continue to have control over who can see their updates, photos, and other entries.
Users of Facebook are able to post activities from other apps thanks to the integration of Timeline with Timeline Apps. For instance, a user of Pinterest might grant Facebook permission to publish his or her activities on Pinterest to the Facebook news feed, enabling friends to view updates from Pinterest.
Who Views Your Timeline?
With the default Facebook privacy settings, any information you add to your Timeline will be visible to your Friends who visit it. A simple way to manage privacy is to be selective in who you accept and invite, so keep this in mind when accepting invitations from friends. In this manner, your Timeline will only be visible to people you know. Anyone who visits your Timeline will be able to see any public updates you have made on Facebook if you have posted a status update that was made public. Since Likes are used in advertising and are viewed as public information on Facebook, they are also viewable on your Timeline. Using your privacy settings, you can keep your Likes off of your Timeline.
How It’s Organized?
A vertical line that runs down the middle of the page divides the timeline into sections. Your activity is displayed in this line as dots in reverse chronological order, and the entries themselves are displayed in the boxes on either side. If you post about an event that is coming up one day and then upload photos from it the next, you will get two Timeline boxes and two dots, with the picture dot being closer to the top of the page. Even if you joined before 2011, your Timeline goes back to the day you joined Facebook. It combines the things you posted with the notes other people made on your home page to show what you did prior to the creation of Timeline. See more about Where Is Facebook Timeline?
What’s On The Timeline?
Everybody has a Timeline on Facebook, and you can view your friends’ and family members’ Timelines whenever you search for them or click on their names. Their Timeline is all about them, just like yours is all about you; it contains all of their public posts, pictures, and messages. Timeline simplifies the process if your reading page is crowded and you only want to check on one particular friend.
Finding lost items is made simple with Timeline if you know how to use it. You can access your friend’s vacation photos from last summer by visiting their Timeline and scrolling down until you reach the previous year. Similarly, it’s simple to search through your Timeline for a post you made about an event that you attended that has the date displayed if you frequently update Facebook but can’t recall the exact day of the event. Keep in touch with friends and family in the present using your main page, but Timeline makes it simple to locate events that happened months or even years ago.
Using Timeline
You’ll be asked to add a new Cover image after selecting “Get it Now.” You can choose from your photos on the site or upload a photo from your hard drive, but we’ve found that clear, full-screen shots work best. Your friends, photos, and other activity are rearranged in the Timeline redesign so that they are all placed directly below your Cover Photo. Your photos, friends, liked items, and other activity are displayed chronologically as you click through each section.
Chronology
You can add more events, status updates, and images in the top left corner of your Timeline. A click on the blue line running down the middle of the page invites you to share more photos, “Life events,” status updates, and locations, especially among the the pre-Facebook days. Yes, Life Events, which let you add anything from home improvements and new roommates to first kisses and new hobbies. Scroll down to go back in time, and the persistent calendar at the top right slides down the page with you so you can focus in on specific years and months. Navigating Timeline is fairly straightforward, if a little click-heavy. Furthermore, a new navigation bar with dropdowns to switch between years and more options for quickly posting status updates appears once you scroll down far enough where your Cover image is hidden.
THINGS MIGHT GET MESSY HERE
The ‘View as’ option under the set of menu buttons on the right side of the window should be noted; it will be your most important tool for shaping up your profile. You can control what other Facebook users can see by allowing you to view your profile from the perspective of your family, friends, colleagues, or anyone else.
Editing
It’s surprisingly simple to adjust your profile’s visual presentation. Tap the star button on a photo or video to “feature” it on the Timeline grew until it filled the entire window’s width. To minimize, click the star button again, and completely pull it from the Timeline by clicking “edit,” and “Hide from Timeline.” Notably, this doesn’t completely remove it from Facebook or from the news feeds of your friends. To do so, either permanently delete the post or untag yourself from the image or video.
Here, things become a mess. A post that has been hidden will no longer be viewable on your Timeline but can still be found using more conventional methods. Specifically, it depends on how public you want that post to be. Depending on your sharing preferences for that particular status update, other posts on your Timeline may be visible to others. Therefore, although your mom might not see the photos from your dinner party in your timeline, your close friends will. More on this in a moment.
Privacy And Old Posts
IF YOU WANT SOME SUBTLETY TO YOUR DIGITAL LIFE, THIS IS GOING TO TAKE A WHILE
You can probably skip the next section if you’re satisfied with what’s already available. Though this might take some time if you want to lock it all down or have some subtlety in your online life. There are a few options available to you, but regrettably there isn’t a magic button that will allow you to bulk-hide or share everything. Just be glad with how you’ve handled your sharing privacy settings in the past, or you’ll be clicking a lot in the future.
IT’S A GREAT TIME TO GET INTIMATELY FAMILIAR WITH YOUR PRIVACY SETTINGS
Of course, you can manually review every shared item in your Timeline and hide, delete, or modify the sharing settings, but that could take weeks. By visiting your Privacy Settings, you can significantly restrict visibility right away. Using the Limit Audience for Past Posts option, you can quickly make all previous posts you’ve made private and only visible to friends. There isn’t a way to start over and make everything from your past visible only to you. However, now is a great time to reacquaint yourself with your Privacy Settings and learn again how tags function on Facebook.
Please double check your default sharing options. All future posts to your Timeline will be published with the same permission levels. Additionally, we advise enabling Timeline Review, a feature that asks you before posting photos that your friends have tagged you in on your Timeline.
Lists
Let’s all agree that Facebook hasn’t found a solution for the friend problem. Should you grant the same level of access to your profile to your boss, grandmother, and ex-husband? Or would you be just as forthcoming with a close old friend as you would a brand-new one? Sadly, you will have to make that decision in this case, and Lists make it simple to decide who gets to see what information. Lists can’t replicate the subtlety with which we structure face-to-face conversations, so explicitly grouping your contacts into different piles based on how much information you want to share with them is kind of gross, but it’s the best you’re going to get for now.
The point here is to set up groups like “Family,” “Close Friends,” “People who would like to see my music rants,” or “Coworkers.” Similar to iTunes’ smart playlists, Facebook also has smart lists that are updated automatically based on your friends’ profiles. This Smart List, for instance, is automatically sorted to include all of your college friends. The same issue arises when individuals identify themselves as family members. You can limit who can see your updates, photos, app activity, and other data on Facebook by using Lists. Using the same lists, you can control who sees new status updates; if you share with a particular group, it will show up in your Timeline sorted in accordance with that group’s preferences.
Activity Log
THE ACTIVITY LOG SHOWS EVERYTHING YOU’VE EVER DONE ON FACEBOOK
Everything about you that has been logged on Facebook is visible in the Activity Log, which is only accessible to you. This includes the first wall posts that new college friends have added, beach photos from last summer, and regretful comments you have left for events you were unable to attend. Fortunately, you are the only person who can see this level of specificity, and you can browse your firehose of personal data by year, month, day, and minute. For instance, I’ve already had Rdio pull months’ worth of listening data into my account, so I can go back to October and see the songs I was listening to at 3:56 PM on October 31. Low’s “Try to Sleep,” if you were wondering.
You can modify your Timeline using the Activity Log as well. By clicking the circle to the right of each status update, you can choose whether to feature, allow, or hide it on your profile or remove it entirely from your account.
What Can You Do With Your Facebook Timeline?
There are not many new features that you can add to your profile once you start using Facebook Timeline; however, there are a few new things that you can do that are not currently possible with the current Facebook interface.
- Adding a Cover Photo0 The cover photo is public by nature; as a result, it will always be visible when people try to view your profile. The largest photo in your profile that is displayed at the top of your timeline is the cover photo, which is meant to be a distinctive representation of you. Facebook hopes that the timeline cover photo will stop spam and the creation of duplicate accounts on a person’s profile.
- Timeline Dates: By categorizing your posts by the date they were posted, Timeline enables you to look back on the past. You can scroll through your posts from the various years since you first joined Facebook. Additionally, if you believe that certain posts or stories shouldn’t be made public, you can hide them.
- Your Facebook activities, such as your posts and the pictures in which you were tagged, as well as the connections you have made, such as your newly added friends or families, will be recorded in your activity log.
- Highlight Stories: From the list of posts in your timeline, you can select a story you believe is important to remember.
Facebook Timeline: Is It Required?
As of now Facebook timeline is still optional, Facebook have not given a definite date on when timeline is going to be rolled out for all its “close to a billion” users. My suggestion is that if the Facebook timeline is unavoidable, you might as well activate it now, become familiar with how to use it before everyone else, and avoid the learning curve.
Conclusion
There is no turning back once the process has begun, so keep that in mind. There is a lot to deal with here with years’ worth of status updates, pictures, likes, and videos, not to mention Events, Notes, location check-ins, and Wall comments. There is nothing on the internet that compares to Zuckerberg’s timeline in terms of scope or reach as his vision for Facebook’s future. Your best option, besides quitting Facebook altogether, is probably to set aside an hour (or three) of your own time to make sure that your new Timeline-enabled personality is safe and attractive.
We appreciate you reading.