Looks like a digital, semi-automated scrapbook. From my understanding, it's not an overhaul of the profile, but another view of your online identity. If they pull it off it could be pretty cool.
I have always wondered why people are so shamed of their past emotions. Ex-girlfriends are part of your life, part of who you are even if you don't want to admit it.
I suspect it to be somehow a configurable feature or you can always remove those manually.
It's not a matter of being ashamed of ex-girlfriends (maybe sometimes it is). The problem is my wife doesn't want to go on my Facebook profile and see pictures of a dozen ex-girlfriends. And I don't want those showing up in there automatically and having to explain.
Of course she does. I don't even know with any certainty that she would dislike my having pictures of exes in my Facebook profile. I don't know that she would want any kind of explanation either.
What I do know is I roll my eyes every time a piece of mail shows up from her old IRA account with her previous married name on it. I know I would be uncomfortable with a bunch of pictures of old boyfriends and an ex husband mixed in with pictures of us and our son on Facebook. I realize she has a past and that's part of who she is now, but I am perfectly happy to leave some of those things in the past. I don't need or want daily reminders. I don't think she does either.
Given my own feelings about the issue, I choose to treat her the way I want to be treated.
Rating how good your past girlfriends were in bed?
Describing how you had the best valentines day with a previous girlfriend, and not with your current wife?
People like to believe they're special. Talking too much about ex-gf/bf's is a recipe for disaster. They can't handle the truth!
Do you tell your wife her ass looks big as well? ;)
I chose ex girlfriends as an example, it could be anything in your past that was "important" but you would rather not have highlighted (e.g. jail time, gang affiliations, being a Backstreet Boys superfan).
They give you control to add / remove things from the timeline so it probably won't be an issue, I'm just curious how they handle those topics.
Good question. I'd imagine that's part of the logic behind giving you "complete control" :)
I'm also interested to see how they associate old photos and other pre-Facebook content with dates.
It's done by date posted, but you can edit those dates. I am going to look into whether the API can change timeline dates programmatically, since OurDoings is perfect for backfilling a timeline semi-automatically with EXIF data.
You can control it, so you can hide or show whatever you want. However, in my case anyway, my ex-girlfriends have fundamentally shaped who I am and I would keep them visible in my timeline because of that.
It is also starting to look a lot like what myspace was. Of course, without allowing customization, they could make it look a lot cleaner and meaningful but only time will tell.
It pretty much is a digital scrapbook. I think allot of FB users will like it. I personally don't see a need for it though.
However I can see the people who currently use scrapbooks and are on fb, really use it on fb.
As a business decision, I think it's a good one. It will keep some of their customers engaged. I am curious to which demographic will really like the feature.
I am banking that fb thinks that the "popular" users will really use it. By "popular" I mean user(s) in any fb graph, that have the most profile views from other users in that same graph. The users that in a fb graph, people want to keep up with the most.
Those users I think don't necessarily have to be early adopters. They are just popular.
FB as business to grow just has
1.) Maintain Users
2.) Have Current Users use the site more and create more content on it
That is probably why we are seeing more and more features to keep users engaged.