Launched Now: Timeline beta, music, movies, TV, and news apps.
Winding down the keynote, Zuckerberg announced that several radically new features debuted at f8 would take effect immediately. Beta testing of the Timeline feature will launch 'after we're done here,' Zuckerberg said (you can sign up here), with the full launch rolling out over the next few weeks. Music, movies, TV, and news apps will also launch immediately. 'We're not going to let you go home empty handed,' Zuckerberg said.
Facebook Timeline sounds like a good idea. It’s your life, organized and summarized for public consumption — or as public as you want to make it. It’s your own two-hour biopic on a single page. It will, ultimately, replace Facebook’s profiles, to become the way we view each other on the popular social networking service.
It may also be Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s biggest risk since launching the social network in 2004.
Facebook calls these grand changes an effort to “Recover the Past”. It’s true, finding what you posted on Facebook on Day One is hard, and sifting through all you’ve said and done to find what’s important is even harder. Personally, I love history and agree that it’s devastating to see so much of our life histories lost to the sands of time.
Those with the richest histories, though, probably aren’t even on Facebook or very active in the service. They likely see Facebook as an inconsequential bother that they’d rather ignore. Timeline, which honestly looks more complex than current profiles, certainly won’t encourage 75-year-old Aunt Mae to share her childhood pictures and stories of growing up poor in Romania.
A Matter of Trust
I don’t know if anyone is ready to trust Facebook’s algorithm to decide what to show and hide as the Timeline grows. Up top is full of minutiae. Down below, it’s an outline. But what Facebook deems important: — a birth, first steps, new job — may only be the highlights. Will it know that the hat I wore in four or five pictures six years ago was important to me because a dearly departed relative gave it to me? I’ll have a recollection of the hat, but have a harder time finding it in Timeline if Facebook deems it less important. To be fair, though, it’s not clear just how much editing we’ll be able to do on our timelines. The better question might be, who would want to spend time editing them, anyway?
The reality is that the story of most people’s lives in Facebook’s Timeline will be a relatively short one. If they joined in 2008, then they have a three year history. If they joined last week, well, they’re just babies, in Facebook Timeline terms. Zuckerberg said you can go back through the Timeline and fill in all your historical details. Most people have a hard time filling out even their most basic information on Facebook and other social service. I run a across a lot of empty or skeletal profiles on Facebook and Google+. People fill in the details when there’s a real value proposition. So LinkedIn has some of the richest profiles because every bit of work history you enter could help you network to the next big job. What is the great benefit in Facebook?
Some might argue that Facebook Timelines and the new Open Graph that will work with it are simply new ways for Mark Zuckerberg to mine your data. It’s a fair argument. Numerous times throughout the presentation, Zuckerberg and other Facebook execs talked about patterns. You know who likes data patterns? Marketers and advertisers, who also happen to be Facebook’s partners.
Granted, the real-time stuff that Open Graph will make possible, like watching movies together and listening to music with your Facebook friends, will not be front and center in the Facebook Timeline. They’ll be part of your real-time activity. But this activity will be collected in the Timeline as a history that becomes part of your Timeline. Over time, you build a pattern within the Open Graph app and with those who are, say, sharing the same activity with you.
Patterns
These patterns and group sharing will appeal to some. It certainly appeals to everyone in Facebook’s corporate offices. Mark Zuckerberg loves it because he’s 27 and his world revolves around innovation. He loves new features. Timeline is the biggest new Facebook feature of all. Yet, Mark’s Facebook users are not all like him. Many are middle-aged and are less interested in the new than they are what simply works. The youngest generation, those who live their lives out loud online, may heartily embrace Timelines, but older generations are less interested in what they did 10 or 20 years ago and more concerned with what’s happening now.
Zuckerberg should keep in mind that Facebook succeeded with the Moms and Dads who traditionally left “the new” to their kids. They use Facebook almost as much as their kids and when the kids have moved onto the next new thing, they’re still in Facebook getting real-time information about stuff that matters today. Though studies show that your mom might represent the typical social gamer, the moms I know are not using Facebook social apps or wondering how they can tell their life stories on the service. Instead they’re trading new photos, jokes and rumors about which teachers are getting tenure and intelligence how one might get her son into a closed-out SAT course.
With Timeline, and to a certain extent Open Graph, Mark Zuckerberg is once again racing forward to the next big thing. Let’s hope that he doesn’t inadvertently leave his users behind.
What do you think of Facebook Timeline and Open Graph? Tell us in the open thread and by voting in the accompanying poll.
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