Facebook Unveils the Timeline: A New Visual Way to Express Yourself

In a new media seminar held on U.C. Berkeley's campus, a professor of the journalism school asked the room of 200 how they documented their lives today. Nearly the entire lecture hall of university students answered Facebook. Truth be told, most Facebook users now find themselves keeping track of their day to day lives through popular networking sites, whether it's through status updates, photo albums, videos, or friend requests. The new scrapbook approach that Facebook will soon be introducing aims to do exactly that for us.

Early Facebook profile page designs kept things fairly simple, covering just the basics of a photo, name, school and work information. As the profile evolved, we see Facebook adding more features to allow readers to tell more of a story. However, since the profile page up until now is structured as a live feed of your activities and attended events, several status updates may send a new job update far down the list i.e., if you are the average active Facebook user keeping everyone up to date about your day. Currently, catching up with friends would require you scrolling through page after page of their older posts in order to get a glimpse of what has been going on. With the new Timeline profile, users will get to capture all their important moments in one place on one page.

Compared to the old profile, Timeline appears to be a much more visual way of sharing your life with friends. Besides seeing the usual posts, users will be able to favorite or hide their updates if they do or don't want something to be featured on the timeline. Alternatively, if your activity feed doesn't incorporate major life events, you also have the option to go back to specifically when they occurred and add it to your Timeline.

Another neat feature to the Timeline is the integration of adding apps. With this, you can share what you like with your friends right on your timeline profile. Discover what your friends are up to - everything from movies they're watching to albums they just bought. The new profile ultimately gives users more freedom when it comes to what they want to highlight. Some may find daily news just as significant as major life events, while others may want to selectively feature their most memorable moments. However you prefer to tell your story, the new Timeline appears to help you do so.

Timeline is set to release in the next couple of weeks, but pictures of the major new feature are already quite the buzz on the net. Check out the preview here.