Facebook Timeline Now Available

Facebook Timeline Now Available to the Public

 

 

At the F8 summit held by Facebook nearly 3 months ago, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced his latest creation:  Facebook Timeline, which he referred to as a visual representation of your life.  Instead of merely listing your interests and personal info, Facebook Timeline shows a detailed, visual overview of your life on Facebook, with the ability to check out what you’ve been out to at a particular point in time.  Developers have been able to utilize the features of Facebook Timeline for a couple of months now, but finally, Facebook Timeline is now available to the public.  So what do you need to know about it?

Facebook Timeline Now Available to the Public | Banner

Facebook Timeline Now Available

The Banner for Facebook Timeline

Facebook Timeline is divided into two parts with the top portion of the timeline being referred to as the Cover and the remainder being referred to as the Heart. The Cover has personal information on the left along with your friends, photos, and Likes. The Cover of your timeline has the feel of the cover of a book; there’s a space at the top for a large, lead photo.

The Heart of the Facebook Timeline is similar to a line graph with date markers that serves as a loading dock for all of the significant events in your Facebook life. As long as you’ve been on Facebook, you can go back and click on newsfeeds, photos, videos, maps, etc… to show what you were doing at specific times in your Facebook life. If you were on Facebook and updating your status, photos, or maps while you were traveling, getting married, pregnant, training for a marathon or at a concert or sporting event, these items will show up in your Timeline.

Facebook Timeline Now Available to the Public | Activity Log

Facebook Timeline Activity Log

Facebook Timeline Activity Log

Facebook Timeline comes with a new tool called the Activity Log, which enables you to control what appears on your Facebook Timeline.  With this function, you can promote a post to featured status, hide it from the Timeline,  or simply delete it altogether.  You can access your activity log by clicking the View Activity button on your timeline, under your cover.  Note: Only you can see your activity log.

To control what is seen or not seen, look for the two dropdown menus at the top-right of each story in your activity log. The first lets you adjust the privacy of your posts, or it shows you the privacy setting if it’s a story created by a friend (like when someone writes on your timeline or tags you in a post). The second dropdown menu controls the visibility of the story on your timeline and gives you the option to hide, allow or feature the story on your timeline.

  • Featured on Timeline: This is the same as starring a story on your timeline.
  • Allowed on Timeline: This means that the story is eligible to appear on your timeline timeline as either a full story or a . All of you stories will have this setting by default, unless you chose to hide them from your profile in the past.
  • Hidden from Timeline: Hidden stories will not appear on your timeline at all. Stories you hide from your timeline will still appear on your activity log and can appear other places on Facebook.

Anyone that upgrades to Facebook Timeline will have a 7 day trial period in order to double-check their information that will appear to others on Facebook. If you’re happy with the information that Timeline shows, you can publish it immediately.

Facebook Timeline Now Available to the Public | Edit Posts

Facebook Timeline Edit FeatureWhen upgrading to Facebook Timeline, users will be able to feature articles throughout their Facebook history or hide articles from others.  As stated above, you’ll see a star on the top right of your post (as illustrated in the photo to the left).  If you click on the ‘Feature‘ button, then the article will be featured and displayed prominently in your Timeline.  If you wish to remove or edit settings, then click on the ‘pencil‘ icon to the right of the feature star.  If you click on the ‘globe‘ icon next to the date, you can choose to make this post available to the public, to your friends only, to your close friends only, or even just your family.  So Facebook Timeline does give you some control over who sees what information.

To enable Timeline, go to this page and click on “Get Timeline.”

What do you think of the new feature?  Leave a comment below to tell us your thoughts about the new Facebook Timeline or if you have any questions.

Picture Source:  http://fbandbusiness.com/articles/introducing-the-new-facebook-timeline