Timeline: A new kind of profile for people to tell their story

Facebook has rolled out a number of major changes, including a major overhaul of user profiles, new apps for playing music and watching video on the site, and social news apps.

Facebook has understood that now it’s all about making it personal and relevant. Facebook wanted to design a place where you feel like home because the place in Internet where you tell your story is really personal.

Millions of people have invested a lot of time in telling the story of their life on their profiles; it’s a really personal product so it should be customized as much as possible.

Before your profile was the first minutes of your conversation, basics, introduction. In 2008 Facebook introduced a completely new profile and by this point people were sharing so many things that the focus of the profile had shifted from just a few pieces of basic information that barely ever changed to all of the things that you have shared and done recently.

But "We are more than just what we did recently" said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckeberg. Most deep conversations that you get into, get into all different points of your life. And this is the point where Timeline comes.

Facebook is introducing timeline- a new kind of profile:

Timeline is the story of your life. It consists of 3 pieces: all your stories, all your apps and a new way to express what you are. All your stories are more visual, much more nicely designed.

What timeline does is it starts off showing all the stuff you have done recently and as you go further back in time, it starts summarizing and surfacing only the important things of your life.

You will see years and you can just use that to quickly get to any point in your life and see the content of that specific time period.

You can put in your timeline all of your apps and all of the stuff that you have done.

The best feature I personally like about the timeline is the "Map timeline view" where you can add the places on a map showing your friends where you have traveled and how much time you spent there.

Apps. People really want to use apps to express themselves. Now you can use apps to express as much content as you want on your timeline. Discover an apps from your friends timelines and use it to your timeline. So, what Timeline really means for you? The first is "self-expression," which means your friends will know a lot more about what you read, what music you listen to, and even what you cook. So no hiding, got it? :) The second is "serendipity," which means if you see a friend of yours has watched a movie on Netflix, you can click on that app in your timeline and begin watching it immediately from within the app. Faster, easier.

Watch a video about a new class of social applications on Facebook:

In timeline you can create a cover photo and profile picture stays as well. You can highlight some things on your timeline. You can control the content and people who see it. On every story on Timeline you can change the privacy by clicking on it.

Timeline is a new way to express who you are! It’s a great way to discover all the stuff that the people have done their whole life. All the stories of your life you will have on a single page.
Facebook automatically adds photos, status updates and life events from your Facebook history to your timeline, but you can also add photos and content from you past to fill out the “Way Back” section. You can add stuff everywhere you want in your timeline.

Facebook expects to roll out Timeline in a few weeks, but there you can see how timeline will look.  

Now it's all about sharing more, not less.

What this change means for business? Here's a very good article about it.