Facebook Timeline announced, re-works the profile page

Facebook Timeline announced
Your life on Facebook laid bare

Mark Zuckerberg has used F8 to show off a new feature of the Facebook profile, called Facebook Timeline.

Instead of being a realtime feed of events, Zuckerberg and co have created a past-time feed of your entire (Facebook) life, with the feature replacing everyone's profile page.

Speaking about Timeline Zuckerberg said: "People feel an intense ownership over their profile. Millions of people have spent a lot time to tell the story of their life through their profile.

"Millions of people have spent years curating their lives and there's nowhere to show this. We think we have the solution. The original profile was the first five minutes, the stream was your 15 minutes, now I want to show you the next.

"This is the heart of your Facebook experience, reworked from the ground up. We have been working on it the whole year and we are calling it Timeline.

Do the Timewarp

Timeline is meant to be the story of your life. It is a lot more visual and will have all your stories. One of the ways you can add to your Timeline is use a series of apps. Zuckerberg announced that you can load an app up that keeps a log of all your runs, what you cook etc.

"What Timeline does is shows all the important stuff recently, then summarises the rest of your life. This is the magic and how you can tell the whole story on a single page."

There's a number of ways you can see the Timeline, including a map view, showing you where you have been in the world.

Timeline allows you to highlight and curate all your stories. It is essentially a profile within a profile - you will even have a profile pick for the Timeline section of Facebook.

To make the Timeline work, a new class of apps have been created. These 'personal' apps allow for you to express yourself in new ways, according to Facebook.

Among those who have created apps for Facebook Timeline, include Spotify, The Guardian, and Netflix. All of these companies are hoping that you will embrace your social side, allowing Facebook to know what song, film or article you are reading at any one time so your friends can join in with the experience.

Marc Chacksfield

Marc Chacksfield is the Editor In Chief, Shortlist.com at DC Thomson. He started out life as a movie writer for numerous (now defunct) magazines and soon found himself online - editing a gaggle of gadget sites, including TechRadar, Digital Camera World and Tom's Guide UK. At Shortlist you'll find him mostly writing about movies and tech, so no change there then.