Later this week users will start to see even more changes to
their Facebook profiles than they have ever done before. This
change gives a complete new overhaul of how you and other viewers
will see your personal profiles and introduces a new feature called
Timeline.
You may have already noticed that there have already been some
changes to the way your games and homepage look, adding a real time
news ticker for you to see what your friends are currently doing.
Along with this a new subscriber button has been added to subscribe
to profiles where you can see updates from their public posts in
your news feeds without being friends. This could be a nice little
feature for those of you who have a lot of followers where you
would like to share important news.
Developers and brands will also be interested to see the new
changes that are happening to Facebook with the introduction of its
Open Graph development, allowing instant updates to coincide with
Facebook automatically.
Profile
Timeline
When you first take a look at your
new profile designs the first thing you may see other than the
massive new cover photo (which we'll talk about later) is a nice
little timeline down the right hand side. Clicking the dates on
this timeline will scoot back to that date and show users what they
posted and did on that day. We found this a very interesting
feature to introduce to profiles as it allows users to read peoples
profiles almost as a blog style feature.
Another aspect to the timeline is
the ability to update statuses, upload pictures, or add events that
have happened in the past. For example; if you wanted to go back to
a date to tell everyone when you started your new awesome job, all
you need to do is click on the update status page from your profile
as you normally would, and then add a date to when the event
happened. Pretty cool huh?
The timeline consists of two columns
side by side which displays stories nestled next to each other by
date. If there was a single event that you feel takes prominence
over others you can choose to make this a 'feature' of your
timeline. Making a part of your profile a feature will display that
story spread over the two columns rather than the individual one
un-featured stories will have. To make a part of your profile a
feature, simply navigate to your home page, hover over the event
you want to become featured, and click the nice new star. We really
like the look of photo albums within the new profile design showing
6 images from the album, giving a better look to its contents than
its previous single photo you'd see on the older profiles.
Activity Feed
The activity feed is a section
you'll find when viewing your own profile, when clicking the link
labelled 'View Activity' you'll find a stream of posts that you
have made recently allowing users to edit display settings for
those particular stories. This is good if there are a few items you
would like to remove from the timeline, or you wanted to customize
what parts of your posts are viewable to others.
Cover Photos
Get ready for some customization!
That's right, Facebook have introduced a new cover image for your
profiles. The cover photos give a look and feel of a personalised
banner which is easily changeable with a quick upload, or you can
use photo's pulled straight from your already uploaded images. We
think this has come from the popularity of people using the latest
photos on the older profiles to make personalised banners above
their news feed. It'll be interesting to see how these are
customized over the next few weeks.
Maps
Another major part to the new
profiles is the use of maps; Facebook have utilized the power of
Bing to bring updates to your friends about when you post stories
and photos with a location. The map is a link found underneath your
cover photo which when clicked displays a larger scale map with all
the events that you have assigned with a location.
There are few more little surprises to the way your profile has
changed, but we don't want to ruin the whole surprise. A couple of
tips we'll give you is to check out the different sections to your
profile we haven't mentioned, as there is a nice look and feel to
various sections such as friends, info and photo albums.
Open Graph
So if you're a developer, or an
owner of branded pages, how do these changes affect you? The answer
is in many ways. A whole new section to Facebook's Open Graph
allows a user to add apps to their Timeline and any actions
specific to that app are shared on Facebook via the Open Graph.
"As your app becomes an important
part of how users express themselves, these actions are more
prominently displayed throughout the Facebook Timeline, News Feed,
and Ticker. This enables your app to become a key part of the
user's and their friend's experience on Facebook."
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/beta/
This gives social apps on Facebook a
lot more power than they used to, an example of an app that
utilizes this is Spotify. A partner of Facebook's new timeline
launch Spotify have improved the links between its player and
Facebook, allowing users to keep song by song information synced
with a profile. There are many other companies that have teamed up
with Facebook recently who spoke at their latest F8 campaign. Some
interesting companies to mention are Hulu, DailyMotion and NetFlix
which points in the direction that Facebook are expanding the way
they do Videos.
All we have to say is; watch this space!