Timeline of your life on Facebook

Facebook has made a radical change to its design and functioning — the first after the launch of Google+. As you make sense of the newlayout over the next few days, let’s take a look under the hood, at how the Facebook experience is set to change.

The most visible feature is Timeline, a record of all the things you have ever done on Facebook — from uploading photos to changing your relationship status. You can also add events to the timeline that occurred before you joined Facebook, like graduation, the vacations you took, etc.

While the idea of an online scrap book does sound appealing, it means that some ghost from the past of your Facebook history will now show prominently. Of course, Facebook does give you the option to remove individual entries from the timeline, but that still involves a lot of work on your part.

A smaller but more worrying change is that social apps can post to your wall, and hence your timeline, with just a one-time permission.

The way it works now is that an app like Farmville asks you every time it wants to post to your wall. After the change, everyone will know that you have harvested eggplants whether you want to or not. Facebook also announced new partnerships with services like Hulu, Washington Post, and Spotify, which will allow users to access content straight from Facebook. While not all of these services will be available in India, you can expect a lot more verbs on your timeline — X is ‘Watching’ this movie, Y is ‘Listening’ to this song.

Pundits have raised concern about this move on two counts — first, information about what content you are consuming is being made public by default, and second, this dilutes the very essence of sharing. Normally you share with your friends only the things you like. But in the revamped system, a post is created the moment, say, you read an article — it doesn’t matter that you may have no opinion about it. In such a case, the post is merely adding to the noise, not recommending something that you must read.

Perhaps expecting an increase in the number of such automatically generated posts, Facebook has created a separate slot called Ticker. This is  where all updates about who achieved what in Mafia Wars or what a friend’s friend commented on a photo will go. Direct interactions such as status updates or photos uploaded by your friends will go into the main story list.

With these changes Facebook sure has responded strongly to Google+. The site has offered new hooks for users. At the same time, the changes, which are controversial from the privacy standpoint, will promote more interactions. This means that Facebook will know more about your preferences than ever before, which will result in more targeted ads.