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The new Facebook time line is going to be live for all users within the next week. For some users, this is a fun new way to express themselves and show off there online lives. For others, it is yet another frustrating change to the Facebook system.
I’ve head the sentiment from a number of users “Leave well enough alone”, “We’ve sick of the changes”. I can relate to both those that are frustrated and those that embrace the changes. While the new features can be fun and can make your online experience better, I often find new features very time consuming to explore and setup. Which, perhaps is the ultimate point of the new features, to get you to spend more time on the service? If that is the point of the changes, it seems to be working well, as looking at it from a most basic level, people sure are spending enough time talking (and complaining) about the change to Facebook.
So if you love it or hate it, the new timeline is coming soon.
There is an article on ZDNET with more details that can be found here.
Sample screen shot of what my timeline currently looks like. It looks differently (depending on if your friends with the person or not and your privacy settings) with more information if your logged in.
In terms of the concerns raised over privacy with the new Timeline function. As far as I have been able to tell, this does not directly change any of your privacy settings. So what you have public now will still be public, what you have set to friends only will still be friends only, etc.
However, the time line does make your history much more visable, so items that you had left publicly available, but had forgotten about them (in the past most old posts had been buried to the depths of facebook, being very difficult for anyone to find), now are again very visible on your new timeline.
In my opinion, the facebook privacy settings in general have become much more complicated and frustrating for the average user. There are simply too many changes for most users to keep up with.
You still can keep anything you like private and / or only choose those you want to share it with, it is just more confusing to understand these settings fully in my opinion.
For example of something that can lead to confusion. If you have a photo set to private (Only ME), but you have tagged people in the photo, the people in the who are tagged in the photo can still see the photo, and I believe depending on their privacy settings, others may be able to see the photo as well. This is very deceptive, as a reasonable person would expect a item to be private an unavailable to others regardless of other settings, when the privacy is set to the Private (Online ME) setting.
The good news is that the time line is very simple to edit and make changes on. Editing items on your new Timeline is really very simple. Please see the example photo below:
I’d love to hear your thoughts on the new Facebook Timeline. A cool new feature or yet another time sink?