Hands on with Facebook’s New Timeline Feature
Coming in to Facebook’s f8 this week, the Facebook platform was beginning to looked tired as the fresh faced Google+ packed on features like a Swiss army knife. Struggling with the signal-to-noise ratio, privacy settings, clunky friend management and a broken content sharing system, Facebook needed a refresh at its yearly developer conference to reassert its dominance. It took Google+ to show Facebook what it could be doing better, and today at f8, Facebook delivered one of the most significant visual refreshes to it’s system in quite some time with it’s new Timeline.
After a hilarious Andy Samberg stage crash, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg (forever now known as ‘The Zuck’ thanks to Samberg) took to the stage to unveil Timeline. In Zuckerberg’s words, if your profile is the first five minutes in a conversation as you introduce yourself to someone you’ve just met and your news feed is the next 15 minutes about what you’ve done recently, then Timeline is the hour-long conversation that follows about the story of your life. Timeline is an almost tumblr-like visual representation of your Facebook life displayed like an online, content-rich, chronological photo album designed to turn your Facebook profile into a better representation of the real you.
We went hands on earlier today with the developer beta of Timeline, spending a fair amount of time cringing at the ghost of Facebook past. Timeline’s crisp, clean layout makes the experience a joy to navigate, retaining the main points of the traditional profile as a launching point for Facebook’s notoriously change-averse users. While we found a few points where Timeline seemed to hang and experienced content loading issues a few times, it should be noted that we’re working with a developer beta version of Timeline that will likely have these kinds of kinks ironed out come release time in a few weeks. We found that the more you share with Facebook, the better the Timeline experience becomes, a catch I’m sure ‘The Zuck’ is pleased with.
With more Facebook features set to launch over the next few days, Timeline has given Facebook a much needed visual refresh to rejuvenate its image in the face of growing Google competition. While Google may have lobbed a of couple grenades at Facebook earlier this week in the social network feature war, this morning at f8 Facebook retaliated with a feature carpet bomb spearheaded by the Timeline.
Facebook just won the first battle. Get ready for the war.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
