Facebook Timeline is a complete overhaul to the current users’ profile, and the company wants to bring to the center stage all the user data that it is already on the social network — in other words Timeline is a scrapbook of what you have been doing since the beginning when you first created the account.
Users on the Facebook are now able to go back in time by scrolling to previous years and see what has been said at one point in time in the past.
For many users, this new profile design is being well received, they like the idea of being able to remember many things that happened in the past and compare it to what’s going on today. For many others, Timeline is not the way to go, they are really unhappy and disappointed. Plus the privacy concerns that this brings because of the easy access to people’s information now, which could cause possible identity theft.
Before starting with Facebook Timeline, here are the top 11 things you should know and look up for:
- How to enable Timeline in your profile: If you are in a group of users that like the idea of this new profile design, you can just simply visit http://www.facebook.com/about/timeline and click the Get Timeline button to enable it.
- Know your grace period before your timeline gets published: Once your profile has been upgraded, you can work on your “scrapbook”, you can delete, hide, promote any post or photos that are already in your profile. You can publish your timeline at any time, but anyway after 7 days your profile will get published automatically. Also check this article — Facebook Timeline is available now whether you like it or not – Getting started guide!
- Unfriend those you don’t know: There could be stuff that you said or did, or images that you have posted in past that you may not want to share with everyone and much less with people who aren’t really your friends– Yeah! All the stuff that you thought it was bury, now is coming back. Nothing gets really deleted –. This is a great time for a house cleaning operation. Deleting friends from your Facebook profile is one way to keep your privacy more secure. You can do this one-by-one, but if you have many “friends” this could take a really long time, here is something that can help you to speed up the process — How to delete unnecessary friends on Facebook.
- Privacy settings on old posts still remain today: Posts that you have shared years ago and you set them so only your friends can view them, this will continue to be viewable to those friends today. This is fine, the feature works as how it suppose to, the concern rises when something you said and posted back then, may not be well received today. So be careful!
- Add a Cover: Cover is the new larger image that you and your friends will see, right above your profile picture. According to the company the Cover image helps others to learn more about you. It also aids in the fight against spam and fake profiles.
- You can expand posts: Facebook knows pretty well what is important and what is not, about all the information in your profile. The social network understands that if a post is important it should be worth reading and displaying in a way that is more focus, so important that posts are expanded. But there is always a chance that not everything you consider important will get expanded. In this case you can manually expand the posts that you feel are important.
- Check how other users view your timeline: If privacy is a big deal for you, once you make a change in your profile to limit who can view what, make sure that you click the gear icon next to the Activity Log button and use the View As tool to see exactly how your friends are seeing your profile.
- Timeline has a great tool that you can use to manage all the aspects of your profile: Activity Log is the place built to help you to edit everything in your profile. There you can promote, hide or delete a post, tweak your profile, among many other things.
- You are in control: If there is a post that you don’t want to share, but you don’t want to delete either, you can change the setting to “Only Me”.
- Add previous event to your timeline: Facebook wants to know everything about your life. Now anything that is added to Timeline can be dated. This can be useful if you have old photos from when you were a kid and you want to add them to your profile and then you can view them in a chronological order.
- New type of Facebook Apps for Timeline: Before you had to grant permission every time an app wanted to share something on the wall. Now with Timeline, once you authorize an app, it won’t ask again to share. So pay attention to which applications you grant permission to, that way you avoid sharing something that you don’t like.
- How to disable Facebook Timeline: This is the most asked question on the Internet today about the social network, and the short and most accurate answer is NOT, YOU CANNOT DISABLE FACEBOOK TIMELINE AFTER YOU HAVE BEEN UPGRADED! Before it became available to everyone, it was only available for developers. This opened a back door, if you will, that many users took advantage of and it only required for a user to become a Facebook developer and register an app. Then the user was able to have access to the Timeline feature. What happened next was that many users started to not liking Timeline, that is when the workaround on how to disable Facebook Timeline commenced to show up all over the web. This is the tutorial that everyone is landing on, but it doesn’t work anymore. This is because the workaround only applied to those who enabled it before it was release to the public. Now that’s it is being rolled out to every user in the social network, there is NO way to remove Timeline and revert back to the old Facebook profile. Eventually, everyone will be switched to Timeline whether you like it or not. One way to get rid of it, is to switch to another social network, perhaps Google+ or in the meantime you can use this trick — How to disable Facebook Timeline [Temporary workaround trick].
Let us know your take on Facebook Timeline? Do you have some tips about the new design that you would like to share in the comments section?
Mauro Huculak is a Windows How-To Expert who started Pureinfotech in 2010 as an independent online publication. He has also been a Windows Central contributor for nearly a decade. Mauro has over 14 years of experience writing comprehensive guides and creating professional videos about Windows and software, including Android and Linux. Before becoming a technology writer, he was an IT administrator for seven years. In total, Mauro has over 20 years of combined experience in technology. Throughout his career, he achieved different professional certifications from Microsoft (MSCA), Cisco (CCNP), VMware (VCP), and CompTIA (A+ and Network+), and he has been recognized as a Microsoft MVP for many years. You can follow him on X (Twitter), YouTube, LinkedIn and About.me. Email him at [email protected].