Facebook’s New Timeline

Facebook's New Timeline

During the last few days, I have been “playing” with configuring the look of my new Timeline in Facebook. After several days of working with my Timeline and tweaking it so that I like the way it looks, I must say that I like it.  It gives my Facebook profile a more professional look.

So how did I get to my current look for my Facebook Timeline?

• I enabled the Timeline
• I took the tour
• I updated my personal information
• I reviewed the posts in each of the sections of my Timeline
• And finally, I created a custom Cover (banner) for the top of my profile/Timeline page

The hardest parts of this process were enabling the Timeline and creating the Cover.  Oh, I could have used a photo from my album like most people that I know are doing, but I wanted something that really showed who I am so…. I had to create a custom Cover.  This was neither easy nor intuitive, but now I know exactly what the dimensions have to be and the process you need to follow.

Some things I like about the Timeline are:

• The Cover which allows you to differentiate yourself from others
• The appearance of the pages that show your friends, photos, likes and other items which used to be available in the left hand menu on your profile page.
• The About page – this naming is much more consistent with the standard website name which contains information about your business.
• I can delete posts that I don’t want to appear on my Timeline
• And I love the View Activity page which allows you to see everything you have posted and any “to do” action items.

Some of the things that people may not like are:

• The Ticker – the endless stream of posts from your contacts that you don’t really look at anymore
• The EdgeRank which determines which posts will show up in the stream on your Home page and the Home page of others
• The increase in ads
• The “frictionless” sharing – which some people will like and others won’t because everything you do is now shared with your connections

As I said above, I don’t usually like all of the changes to Facebook that we need to deal with on a regular basis.  Also, there are still some bugs in the display and some features don’t always work the way you would think they should.  However, when all is said and done, I have to say I like most of the new features in Facebook and the Timeline.  I think you will too.