Bustr Bensn

Thoughts on Facebook’s Timeline

In no particular order:

For a timeline, it’s remarkably difficult to scan.
FINALLY, a way to browse the archive (Though, Twitter and most other social network sites don’t really do a good job of this. Last place to do it semi-okay was Livejournal… I’ve used their archive successfully many a time.)
It’s going to be REALLY interesting to watch what happens when people need to edit their histories. Entire relationships, snip. Broken friendships, snip. Telling the story of our present is dependent on being able to leave out certain things from the current narrative.
On the other hand, deleting whole subplots of the timeline will probably be almost as cathartic as the clinic in Eternal Sunshine.
Speaking of subplots, I think that’s something that the current timeline UI is going to have trouble speaking to. Our life is made out of hundreds and thousands of shorter stories, and right now there’s no way to view a particular story from beginning to end. The assumption is that our entire lives are all part of the same book. It’s like reading the dictionary from front to end, a bit.
The scroll-scanability of it is pretty dang pretty. Kellianne approved, when I showed it to her.
I worry for intersect.com.
The key to the timeline is going to be whether or not their summarizing algorithm really is able to pull out the “important” stuff from the past without a ton of curation from the user. Just as people don’t like to make lists of friends, I doubt that scrapbooking is a new task that we’d like to file alongside answering our inboxes.
If there were subplots, it would be neat to be able to see a summary of the full story, and then zoom in on it.
I must have Google Maps UI on the brain.
I’m excited to see how much of the timeline makes sense to implement on Health Month and Budge. I’ve been thinking about the verb + noun sentence structure for a while now, and love that Facebook has built me an API to go along with it.
Frictionless sharing of the “ticker”. Bring on the “am I accidentally broadcasting this frictionlessly?” paranoia.
On the other hand, maybe this particular technology trend will result in all of us ceasing to lead double- triple- quadruple-lives. Just be the person that you are to all the people that you know. Including yourself. No shame. Wouldn’t that be awesome? Down with hiding parts of ourselves because we’re ashamed what people might think if they knew it about us.
I know that that particular fight is going to be long, and bloody. No illusions there, but I bet the young people will lead the way (after a generation or two of serious youthful-timeline purging fests).
Having looked at a few peoples’ timelines so far (those who figured out how to turn it on a week before launch), be prepared for a new wave of “liking” things from your way back past. Might inspire a little spring cleaning, perhaps?