Engage Brain Open Mind: Facebook Timeline Redefines User Profiles

Facebook Timeline Redefines User Profiles

via Mashable! by Ben Parr on 9/22/11

Timeline

Courtesy of Robyn Peterson.

Timeline

Timeline Mobile

Courtesy of Robyn Peterson.

Timeline

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has unveiled the company’s much anticipated overhaul of profile pages, transforming the user profile into a virtual scrapbook that digs all the way into your past.

At the company’s f8 developer conference in San Francisco, Zuckerberg laid out Facebook’s vision for the future of profiles. He described the history of the Facebook profile, starting with the original profile from 2006, when Facebook was still known as TheFacebook. He explained that through all of these iterations, Facebook profiles have been a good gauge of what you’re doing now, but they are not a good way to share what you or your friends have done in the past.

“We’re more than what we did recently,” Zuckerberg explained to the audience.

It was then that Zuckerberg unveiled Timeline, the revamped version of the Facebook Profile. It’s a way to show off who you are, what you do and where you’ve been. It’s a complete design overhaul that makes a visual history of everything you’ve ever done, all the way to when you were born.

SEE ALSO: Facebook Timeline: Here’s What It Looks Like [VIDEO]

Facebook automatically adds photos, status updates and life events from your Facebook history to your timeline, but you can also add photos and content from you past to fill out the “Way Back” section. In his demo, Zuckerberg showed how to add a baby picture to the beginning of your timeline.

“It’s fun and easy to fill out your timeline,” Zuckerberg said.

The new profiles also include a map feature that lets you see where you’ve been, thanks to Facebook Places. It maps out your travel. You can even mark your place of birth. But perhaps the most striking feature is the cover photo, which displays a giant image at the top of the new profile page.

Timeline’s purpose is to resurface all the content you have created on Facebook. The problem is simple: once a status updates leaves your profile, you are unlikely to ever see it again. Zuckerberg and the Facebook team want to make Facebook a place to express who you are while discovering who your friends are at the same time.

You can check out more from Facebook’s f8 conference in the gallery we’ve included below: