My Facebook page with the new timeline.
I caught the end of the Live f8 developers conference last night, and then watched Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote and—while I would probably be happy never hearing the word “experience” or the phrase “express who you are” ever again—I am very excited about the work Facebook is doing!
I knew something was up with that crappy redesign we were handed (see previous post), it seemed so unstrategic and flawed. But now it is clear how everything will come together when Timeline and Open Graphs are integrated. I’m not going to sit here and summarize these changes (so you can check out Mashable’s handy-dandy guide) because it’s all anyone will be talking about for a while.
Graduate school project: fbminder
Back in graduate school, my final project speculated about how we could access all of the information we’ve ever put into Facebook to learn from the patterns of our behavior. It seemed like a missed opportunity for all that information to just disappear. Since I did not want to disrupt established social networking experiences, the tool lived in the back-end of Facebook. This made sense because it was a hypothetical tool for online safety, but I never thought about how cool it would be if all that information became fore-fronted instead. Zuckerberg was spot on in his keynote when he said, “People have spent years curating the story of their lives and today there is just no way to show that.”
I had assumed they purposefully designed the site to make old information hard to get at—as if your past was something to be ashamed of or completely unrelated to your present. Now, I realize that those time-diving difficulties were just baggage from the original layout designed in 2004. Therefore, facilitating the ability to summarize your Facebook history required a completely retooled platform. Take it one step further, and juxtapose that ability to cruise back in time with the Open Graph model of sharing and you’ve got a paradigm shift: forever changing the way we look at the world.
Right now I’m still marinating on exactly what this means, but it’s a very exciting innovation.
