Why is Everyone So in Love with Facebook’s Timeline?
When Timeline was first announced at F8 this year, it turned out to be a reporter’s wet dream. “Timeline, the new profile design that the site turned on last week, is really, truly beautiful,” writes Farhad Manjoo of Slate. ”This is the single greatest change that Facebook’s ever pushed on us,” says Sam Biddle at Gizmodo. “From what I’ve seen so far, it’s a solid update,” says Don Reisinger at CNET. I wonder if these reporters are smoking crack. Or if they just got tired of staring at Facebook’s white and blue simplicity, and, though they’d never admit it, deep down longed for the freedom to customize their profiles ala MySpace.
There are elements of Facebook’s Timeline that I like a lot, and I’ll get to those in a minute. But calling the profile redesign “the greatest change Facebook has ever created” is going too far. Timeline is a cool way to see your life as an online scrapbook (if you’re willing to take the time to curate your life for Facebook’s advertisers and servers), but where it fails is in its utility. Removing the old wall and replacing it with Timeline makes it harder to use Facebook. (Unless I’ve been using Facebook wrong all these years.)
Facebook’s challenge is to display a ton of data, while also encouraging its users to constantly submit new content. The old profile page (the “wall”) provided a very simple way to view what your friend has been up to, and to share content publicly.
Facebook Wall 1.0
The first(?) version of Facebook’s wall was purely utilitarian. It might not have been a gleaming example of UI, but it provided an easy, clear, and linear way to explore information. It featured tabs for “Wall,” “Info,” “Photos,” “Boxes,” and allowed you to add your own apps. But the Wall was clearly the most important. It wasn’t cluttered with new photos. It provided the basic information about the user. It looked the same on your personal wall as it did on your friend’s wall. You could go to your wall to see all of the comments your friends made on your posts and easily scroll down to see all of the latest interactions. You could post your status and easily attach content.
Facebook Wall 2.0
The next revision of Facebook’s wall featured a few improvements, though they weren’t perfect. It removed the tabs on the top of the page, and moved them under the user photo. It also summarized your basic information at the top of your profile, so anyone who visited your wall could easily get a snapshot of your information. Facebook is all about stalking your friends, acquaintances, and future partners, so this short summary of key information. It allowed you to note who your family members were, and list them separately from friends. Advertisements were prominent on your profile, and took up a lot of screen real estate. The “recent photos” feature was a little annoying — since it would auto update with your latest photos — and you had to remove any that you didn’t want featured in the top of your profile (note how this lack of control over the visuals at the top of your profile was “solved” in the next version of the design.

Facebook Wall 3.0: AKA “Timeline”
In this update of the wall, which is still rolling out to Facebook’s users, is a revamp of the profile page. It focuses on many of the items of data Facebook wants to collect from its users, while providing a personalized header image — the largest screen real estate dedicated to users’ expressing themselves yet. It also bumps the content much further down the screen, so there is less information that makes it above the fold. This makes the wall page less functional for viewing your own content. Overall, the design is not very functional. I don’t find myself viewing my profile page since I converted it to the Timeline. I just ignore my profile page. I used to view my profile page and interact with it all the time. I’m wondering if this is the case for other users. Do you view your profile page more or less since it was converted to “Timeline”?

Facebook would certainly argue that the place you are supposed to interact with any content — whether that be something you posted, or something your friend posted — is your “stream.” This may work well for users who have less than 100 friends and who avoid the subscribe feature like the plague. With 975 friends, my experience may be a bit unique, but the majority of people I know have over 500 friends on Facebook. This makes it difficult to keep up with people interacting with your personal content. Now, the only place to do this by viewing all of your notifications. But this isn’t as functional as the old wall/profile page, to view all of the latest comments on your content. If someone comments on your status, as viewed below, you have to click on a link to take you to that status page. There is no way to view content in a vertically organized fashion, like it used to exist on the wall.
The layout of basic information in the new design successfully highlights the key pieces of content that are important. It lets someone click to view your friends, your photos, a map of places you’ve checked in, and your subscribers (which I now have 6,482 of and am gaining at a rate of about 1,000 per day– a subject that requires its own post to come later) or, if you don’t have subscribers, it displays “likes.” That said, “likes” are clearly less important in this version of Facebook’s wall. Even Facebook recognizes that “Likes” are holding less value as we like hundreds of topics and brands for various promotions and other reasons. Can you name all of the things you’ve “Liked” on Facebook? I know I can’t.

Profile without subscribers. Here you can easily request less updates from your friends or more, depending on how annoying they are. This is a key new feature in the updated profile and new subscribe product:
So far, so good. The photo up top is a little bit like Facebook making up for all these years of not letting us customize any visuals on our profile, but I can deal. It’s kind of fun to have a pretty picture up there. I like to see what images other people post. They rarely get updated, but it’s more of a statement image than the constantly updated photo stream that was in the last model of the profile page.
Then, here comes UI chaos. From a programming standpoint, I’m sure there is an elegant beauty to being able to generate a layout that can fit a wide range of content of all sizes, from photos to check ins to status updates to the tracks you’re rocking out to on Spotify. This is no easy task, and perhaps one that in no way shape or form could be possible in the earlier version of the Facebook wall.

What bothers me most about the new profile is how the information is no longer linear, and it also no longer focuses on your content and interactions. Instead, if you read a few articles on Washington Post Social, they take up a big box on your profile page. These articles may not be all that important to you, or they may be old news — but suddenly, take precedence over other content on your wall because your latest physical activity was clicking on a link to read that page. Meanwhile, the worst of the layout issues is that the entire profile is now supposed to be a “Timeline.” This works for content you’ve added since joining Facebook, but now all of your photos (which may be uploaded at a different time or year when they were taken) are completely out of order. Facebook asks you to go and chronicle every moment of your life, so they can know everything about you. But the process of updating this information is tedious. I tried to add a few pieces of information to my Timeline about when I’ve moved to new cities and performed in plays, but adding this information isn’t fun at all. And it gets buried somewhere in my Timeline — why should I bother updating this content? Is the only value to provide Facebook more data so they can even better target advertising? What do I get out of this as a Facebook user? Do I really want to track my entire life story on Facebook?
The biggest qualm I have with Facebook’s timeline is its waste of screen real estate to visually communicate something that could take up less space in a more elegant, linear way. It is not natural to read content from right to left to right to left to right to left to right, especially when the content type is not consistent. Removing the best linear way to view your content is a shame. It’s nice to see Facebook evolving in how it thinks about design and aesthetics, but this product doesn’t seem to help in supporting the conversation and connections that Facebook’s success is built on.

Edited to add: When a friend shared this post, I was reminded of another time the Timeline wastes space. Upon her sharing a link to this post, which I shared on my wall, it showed up on my Timeline again.
In summary, Timeline is a cool feature, but it shouldn’t replace the profile page/wall. I’d be curious to know if Facebook is seeing more or less content generation since the new Timeline feature started rolling out. It’s great to show that she shared my post (thanks Courtney!) but it also means every time a friend shares my content, it appears on my wall again. It’s not smartly collated into one square — it takes up infinite squares. There are other ways this happens, I’ve noticed near-duplicate content occurs frequently on the Timeline. Facebook could tie all of the related content together, at least minimizing the spread of similar content, especially links to the same content.
What do you think about Timeline? Am I getting it all wrong? Is Timeline the greatest product Facebook ever rolled out?


















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