Facebook will soon start requiring people to switch to their new profile format known as Timeline, making photos, links and personal quips from the past much easier to find.
Timeline is essentially a gathering 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 taken the effort. Timeline allows people to jump to the older material more quickly.
Timeline may have some drawbacks, though. 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.
Facebook gives some tips for Timeline:
— You can change privacy settings on individual items to control who has access. You might want to limit embarrassing photos to your closest friends, delete some posts completely, or at hide them so only you can see them.
— You can change the date on any post. For example, if you took a few months to post vacation photos, you can move them to appear with other posts from the time you took that trip. You can also add where you were, taking advantage a location feature that Facebook recently started offering.
— 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 be displayed across the top and can be anything that reflects who you are. The dimensions are more like a movie screen than a traditional photo, so a close-up portrait of your face isn’t ideal, but one of you lying horizontally works well.
— You can add things before you joined Facebook, back to when you were born. Life events can include photos from childhood or high school as well.
— Click on Activity Log to see all of your posts at a glance and make changes to them one by one.
