Facebook Launches Latest Updates

Published on Wednesday, 05 October 2011 14:40

	By Mel Morton Follow @Mel_Morton

During his keynote at the recent F8 developer conference in San Francisco, Mark Zuckerburg announced the latest changes to Facebook and launched the ‘Timeline,’ which he described as being the “story of your life.”

The timeline, an updated version of your profile page, will date back in time to when you were born, recording all your status updates, uploaded photos, and everything you have ever posted on Facebook.  Whilst also allowing you the opportunity to go back and fill in those missing and important events in your life, should you want to.

Samuel W Lessin explains the benefits of the Timeline: “… since the focus is on the most recent things you posted, more important stuff slips off the page…. The way your profile works today, 99% of the stories you share vanish. The only way to find the posts that matter is to click "Older Posts" at the bottom of the page.  Again.  And again.”

The new Timeline he says is: “wider than your old profile, and it's a lot more visual.  The first thing you'll notice is the giant photo right at the top.  This is your cover, and it's completely up to you which of your photos you put here.”

“As you scroll down past your cover, you'll see your posts, photos and life events as they happened in time. You choose what's featured on your timeline. You can star your favorites to double their size or hide things altogether.”

No longer satisfied with storing your basic personal information, it seems Mark Zuckerburg is now encouraging users to update and share their “entire lives” on Facebook.  To begin using it as an online scrapbook, somewhere you can post a lifetime of memorable data and photos, even the embarrassing ones of you as a baby.

Along with sharing what you ate for breakfast and other mundane details, you can now reveal your specific interests and preferences, allowing friends to share what you’re reading, the music you listen to, and movies you have watched.

In an interview with Steven Levy of Wired, Facebook said: “People will become closer with each other, be able to express themselves and generally participate in a community of friends and contacts more deeply and fruitfully than they could hope to do so in the physical world.”

This translates to knowing far more about friends and family than you ever wanted to.

To enable content within Facebook for the first time, Zuckerburg announced partnerships with companies such as Spotify, Netflix and the Washington Post who are creating apps to connect to Facebook through “The Open Graph”.   The first version of which, f8 2010, enabled websites to integrate with the social graph, allowing web surfers to Like WebPages they visited.

The latest edition, f8 2011, integrates with Media applications, enabling users to fulfil their media needs through apps on Facebook and then share it, while also preventing you from needing to leave the social media site.

The downside for this convenience is that it records all your media activity, which will be stored permanently on Facebook and made accessible to others should you allow it.  By registering on Facebook connected apps or websites you have the ability to ‘Add’ the webpage or app to your Timeline, sharing it with your Facebook friends.

The issue of ‘sharing’ such information makes many people worried.  Particularly as another recent change is that now, when you connect with an app and ‘Add’ something to your Timeline, you are giving permission to share every time you ‘Add’ to your timeline not just on that occasion.

Which is why there are concerns.  You may not always want to share every article you read.  Or worse still you may forget that the ‘share’ feature is active and inadvertently share something inappropriate and potentially embarrassing.  To prevent this happening, all you need do is disable the function once you have given approval for the app, to avoid over sharing.

But what if you don’t want to share certain information with all of your friends? You do have the facility to select certain friends to share with.  However, as always, it will be a case of you finding and then disabling the default setting that is often set up to allow everyone to see everything.

Other changes include ‘Gestures’ which will allow you the opportunity to do more than just Like something.  With Facebook ‘Gestures’ you will be able to use a ‘verb’ to say you have ‘Watched’ a movie or ‘Listened’ to a song.

Less controversial changes involve you being able to organize your Friends into small groups, such as ‘close friends’ or ‘acquaintances,’ which many believe is a response to the Circles of friends you can create within Google+.  While a Ticker will offer real-time updates on what your close friends are up to in a feed that Facebook describe as “Lightweight” stories, such as who’s become friends with whom.

There are also changes to how we receive our news updates.

“Now, News Feed will act more like your own personal newspaper,” Facebook blogger, Mark Tonkelowitz explains: “You won't have to worry about missing important stuff.  All your news will be in a single stream with the most interesting stories featured at the top.  If you haven't visited Facebook for a while, the first things you'll see are top photos and statuses posted while you've been away. They're marked with an easy-to-spot blue corner.”

However, Mark continues: “If you check Facebook more frequently, you'll see the most recent stories first.  Photos will also be bigger and easier to enjoy while you're scrolling through.”

With these new announcements comes an increased anxiety about the vast amount of personal data Facebook has stored from their 750+ million users and what they might do with it.  Even so the company continues to achieve record numbers of users on the site.

“For the first time ever in a single day we had half a billion people use Facebook,” Mark Zuckerburg said at the f8 conference.

Whilst many people will perhaps remain reluctant to update their ‘entire life’ on to the site, Facebook founder, Zuckerburg shrugs away such concerns.

“The thing I actually find the most interesting is discovering stuff about my friends…” he told Steven Levy of Wired, “You see who is into what. One day you see someone watching a few hours of TV in a row, and you’re just like, ‘Oh, this person must be sick at home today.’”

An observation that is sure to leave many people feeling uneasy.