The good, bad and ugly of Facebook's Timeline

Fact: Most of us have a penchant for getting back on Facebook after considerable whining and cursing. Fact: The social networking giant continues to force us into learning and unlearning a number of new things and much to our irritation continues to stretch our cerebral as much as Facebook engineers stretch theirs. Among all the ubiquitous features in motion, and yet to be, the ‘Timeline’ till date remains the most dramatic addition to your profile. The personal scrapbook Once the Timeline feature is enabled prepare to see personal photos, comments and major life events since the time you opened an account on Facebook organised into a long-scrolling tableau. It’s a chronological scrapbook and a pretty sensitive feature that organises information and life history under various years. It details how many friends you may have made in a year, career changes, personal victories and defeats, and a host of things which you’ve been feeding Facebook. [caption id=“attachment_96871” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“The Facebook timeline. AFP”]  [/caption] Once you are familiar with the way your home page will roll out, you can control information through the privacy settings. You can even try your hand at creating fresh points in your timeline, equivalent to an online scrapbook. For instance, a summer program or volunteer work that may be close to your heart. Creating new memories, and adding your thoughts to it, making it personal and accessible only by you. A charming addition to the Timeline is the map feature. It maps out all the places you’ve travelled and you can even mark your place of birth. The memory punishment One of the biggest challenges is when information you’ve stashed deep down, surfaces to haunt you. If you were in a relationship that didn’t culminate into happily-ever-after, or were going through the roughest possible patch of your life, the Timeline will make it easily accessible for anyone. What can help is, if before the feature goes live on your profile you either delete the pictures and store it elsewhere or when the incriminating posts pop up you hide it from your timeline. What’s more, the earlier blanket privacy option that allowed one to select who could see the posts is no longer available anymore in the Timeline. Another addition to the Timeline is that you can track which friend you’re lost, aka, who’s unfriended you. To know exactly when it happened, all you need to do is a pick a year in the timeline and locate the ‘Friends’ box, click on the option that allows you to see how many friends you made in a year. When you scroll down the list in the Timeline, as you go through all the names, when you see ‘add friend’ option against the name of a friend, you’ll know if you haven’t unfriended them, or they’re the ones who’ve axed you out of their friend list. While you’ll still not get real time updates on when a friend has taken you off his/her list, you’ve got to be made of some strong stuff if you’ve been the recent victim of Facebook friend cleansing. Mashable Founder, Pete Cashmore warns that while the Timeline seems like a dramatic addition, the next in line auto-sharing ‘Gestures’ may limit your ability to surf online. According to him Facebook will make sharing even easier by automatically sharing what you’re doing on Facebook-connected apps. So while you won’t have to ’like’ something when you click on ‘Add to Timeline’ on any website or app, it will give permission to Facebook to share your activity with your friends. The activity could be as harmless as reading an article online, or watching a video, but what is scary is that your net activity can now be tracked easily. So while Timeline is a brand new feature set to change the way you feed information on Facebook and share, it’s really upto ‘you’ how much you want to really share. Statutory warning remains — Read before you click on an app or addition to your profile.