First Thoughts on Facebook Timeline
Facebook has announced the rollout of its new service Timeline, starting with New Zealand. Once successful, it will launch globally.
The service itself is great – it gives you, your friends, and any stalkers who have made it onto your Facebook page, the ability to view a timelined version of your previous activity, going back many years and accessible by specific months.
You can see when friendships started, a summary of activity per month, events attended, places and people you've been tagged with. The new app integration means things you've engaged with or consumed, for example games played, or other applications with personal information will be in there too. It's pretty detailed, and you can see a lot of information.
New Zealand was picked because we're English-speaking, making the response and feedback from users a more streamlined process. We're also not as interconnected with the rest of the Facebook user-base as say the US and UK, making our two million people population (50% of the country use the 'book) the perfect test environment.
Interestingly, Facebook actually launched Timeline in September and made it available to developers, or those who pose as them – like me and, pre-launch, another million people. Until now however, its availability wasn't publicised to allow the Facebook team a chance to make final tweaks and changes, and perhaps brush off a lawsuit from Timelines.com.
While an awesome service, there are a number of privacy ramifications that are highly concerning. Your entire Facebook history is now available instantly, by month, at the click of a button – people no longer have to conduct a deep and thorough search to find your perhaps embarrassing or objectionable images, they can simply jump into them.
By making a user's history available and instantly accessible, if they're unaware of the old content, or don't have a great understanding of privacy settings (both problems I have), it opens up a raft of potential issues around privacy – something Facebook has already been slapped on the wrist for around the world numerous times.
It will be interesting to see the debate that develops around this – love it or hate it? Jump online and tell us what you think @PN_NZ or on Facebook.