الرئيسية
NEW
YORK (AP) — Facebook will start requiring people to switch to a new
profile format known as Timeline, making photos, links and personal
musings from the past much easier to find.
Timeline is essentially
a scrapbook of your whole life on Facebook, compared with a snapshot of
you today found on Facebook's traditional profile page. Once activated,
Timeline replaces the current profile.
Although some people have
already voluntarily switched to Timeline, Facebook hadn't made that
mandatory. Beginning Tuesday, Facebook is telling some users that they
have seven days to clean up their profiles before Timeline gets
automatically activated. Facebook is rolling out the requirement to
others over the next few weeks.
At some point, even those who haven't logged on to Facebook in a while will be automatically switched.
Timeline
doesn't expose anything that wasn't available for sharing in the past.
Many of those older posts had always been available. People could get to
them by continually hitting "Older Posts," although most wouldn't have
bothered. Timeline allows people to jump to the older material more
quickly.
Timeline also doesn't necessarily reflect the fact that
your circle of friends has likely expanded in recent years. A party
photo you posted in 2008 to a small group of friends would be more
visible to relatives, bosses and others you may have added as friends
since then.
You'll have a week to curate the Timeline by moving stuff around, hiding photos or featuring them more prominently on your page.
Some things to consider:
—
You can change privacy settings on individual items to control who has
access. You might want to narrow embarrassing photos to your closest
friends or delete some posts completely, or at least hide them so only
you can see them.
— You can change the date on a post. For
example, if you took a few months to post photos from a trip to
Portugal, you can move them to appear with other posts from the time you
took that trip. You can also add where you were, retroactively using a
location feature that Facebook hadn't offered until recently.
—
For major events in your life, you can click on a star to feature them
more prominently. You can hide the posts you'd rather not showcase.
—
Besides your traditional profile photo — your headshot — you can add
what Facebook calls a cover photo. It's the image that will splash
across the top and can be a dog, a hobby or anything else that reflects
who you are. Keep in mind the dimensions are more like a movie screen
than a traditional photo, so a close-up portrait of your face won't work
well, but one of you lying horizontally will. But you don't even have
to be in it.
— You can add things before you joined Facebook, back
to when you were born. Life events can include when you broke your arm
and whom you were with then, or when you spoke your first word or got a
tattoo. You can add photos from childhood or high school as well.
—
If you feel overwhelmed with so many posts to go through, start with
your older ones. Those are the ones you'd need to be most careful about
because you had reason to believe only a few friends would see them.
—
Click on Activity Log to see all of your posts at a glance and make
changes to them one by one. Open Facebook in a new browser tab first,
though. That way, you can have one tab for the log and the other for the
main Timeline.
YORK (AP) — Facebook will start requiring people to switch to a new
profile format known as Timeline, making photos, links and personal
musings from the past much easier to find.
Timeline is essentially
a scrapbook of your whole life on Facebook, compared with a snapshot of
you today found on Facebook's traditional profile page. Once activated,
Timeline replaces the current profile.
Although some people have
already voluntarily switched to Timeline, Facebook hadn't made that
mandatory. Beginning Tuesday, Facebook is telling some users that they
have seven days to clean up their profiles before Timeline gets
automatically activated. Facebook is rolling out the requirement to
others over the next few weeks.
At some point, even those who haven't logged on to Facebook in a while will be automatically switched.
Timeline
doesn't expose anything that wasn't available for sharing in the past.
Many of those older posts had always been available. People could get to
them by continually hitting "Older Posts," although most wouldn't have
bothered. Timeline allows people to jump to the older material more
quickly.
Timeline also doesn't necessarily reflect the fact that
your circle of friends has likely expanded in recent years. A party
photo you posted in 2008 to a small group of friends would be more
visible to relatives, bosses and others you may have added as friends
since then.
You'll have a week to curate the Timeline by moving stuff around, hiding photos or featuring them more prominently on your page.
Some things to consider:
—
You can change privacy settings on individual items to control who has
access. You might want to narrow embarrassing photos to your closest
friends or delete some posts completely, or at least hide them so only
you can see them.
— You can change the date on a post. For
example, if you took a few months to post photos from a trip to
Portugal, you can move them to appear with other posts from the time you
took that trip. You can also add where you were, retroactively using a
location feature that Facebook hadn't offered until recently.
—
For major events in your life, you can click on a star to feature them
more prominently. You can hide the posts you'd rather not showcase.
—
Besides your traditional profile photo — your headshot — you can add
what Facebook calls a cover photo. It's the image that will splash
across the top and can be a dog, a hobby or anything else that reflects
who you are. Keep in mind the dimensions are more like a movie screen
than a traditional photo, so a close-up portrait of your face won't work
well, but one of you lying horizontally will. But you don't even have
to be in it.
— You can add things before you joined Facebook, back
to when you were born. Life events can include when you broke your arm
and whom you were with then, or when you spoke your first word or got a
tattoo. You can add photos from childhood or high school as well.
—
If you feel overwhelmed with so many posts to go through, start with
your older ones. Those are the ones you'd need to be most careful about
because you had reason to believe only a few friends would see them.
—
Click on Activity Log to see all of your posts at a glance and make
changes to them one by one. Open Facebook in a new browser tab first,
though. That way, you can have one tab for the log and the other for the
main Timeline.