Facebook Timeline officially being release to everyone – Get a glimpse

Facebook Timeline - Mark Zuckerberg Conference

Facebook Timeline is now being release to everyone after several months of testing, but if you signed in to your profile this morning and you didn’t see the option to enable Timeline it’s because Facebook is deploying the new feature slowly. The company has started rolling out in New Zealand and other regions are getting it pretty soon.

Back in September was when Facebook Timeline was first introduced and it was released as a beta service, only for developers, but this didn’t stop many users to find the way to enable the new feature. Since then a stable version of Timeline was in the works to be released a few months after bugs, privacy concerns and other stuff has been worked out; now the company feels confident and the new feature is ready for prime time — whether you like it or not.

“We announced Timeline in September and made it available to developers building apps on our platform. Since then, over a million people have signed up for the developer beta to access Timeline. The feedback we’ve received so far has been invaluable. Starting today, we are making Timeline more widely available as we measure speed and other types of performance. We’ll begin by making it available to people in New Zealand and then roll it out more broadly in the near future.” — said Samuel W. Lessin, Facebook’s product manager.

About Facebook Timeline

If you recall, Facebook Timeline is like a scrapbook of your life (“more visual”) on a web page and it is a feature focus on bringing to front stage the best of your content from the news to photos, status and apps you’ve used, and places that you have visited. Your content will now be organized in a more meaningful graphical way that you can scroll to the day of your birth, and the further back you scroll Timeline will focus more in important events and things that are of interest to you.

When Facebook Timeline is enabled to you, one of the first thing you’ll notice is the huge image on the top of your page. This is your cover, and of course you can change it to whatever you want.

As you go down the page, you’ll see your posts, images and other events in chronological order as they happened. You have the ability to control what is featured on your timeline. You can even star the posts that you like the most, which is going to double their size or you can hide them.

Adding past events

Facebook wants to know every little thing about you, from the day of your birth until the present day — sounds a little bit intrusive, don’t you think? — If there is something important that happened to you and it isn’t in the timeline, you can go back when the event occur and add it by clicking the Life Event link on the right, where you add a new post.

Past Events - Facebook Timeline

Or going to your Activity Log. Here is where you’ll be able to find everything you have shared on Facebook. Click on any post to allow or disable to appear in your timeline. From this log you can also star, unlike or report a post.

Activity Log - Facebook Timeline

Apps and your Facebook Timeline

The social network giant is also introducing a new type of apps that will let you display things you like in a different way.

The new apps will help you to find out what your friends are up to, and you can even be part of what they are doing by join them (e.g., play a track that one of your friend is listening to, or watch the same TV show).

Apps are available now for those “lucky” users that already have Timeline enable, for everyone else apps are going to be available as soon as you have your timeline setup.

Important Note: Once Facebook Timeline is release officially to everyone, you will have to use it, apparently there will not be a way to remove/disable/ or turn off the feature, like it was possible in the past when Timeline was in the beta stages — unless every user on the social network gets together for a common purpose and convince the company to add a way to bring the old Facebook back.

Many people seem to like this new feature and others not so much, what do you think about Facebook Timeline? Be the first and leave your thoughts in the comments below.

About the author

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.