[ntkachov]

The zig-zag flow is one of the most obnoxious things i've ever seen in a website. It is one of the worst ways of displaying information ever.

Lets take this to the extream. Lets say you had a serverlog with 1 million entries and you had to parse it by hand for what ever reason. would you rather see

[Jun 10, 12:32] /index.html 200 54ms nick

[Jun 10, 12:32] /index.html 200 54ms nick

[Jun 10, 12:32] /index.html 200 54ms nick

[Jun 10, 12:32] /index.html 200 54ms nick

[Jun 10, 12:32] /index.html 200 54ms nick

or this

[Jun 10, 12:32] /index.html 200 54ms nick

                                          [Jun 10, 12:32] /index.html 200 54ms nick

[Jun 10, 12:32] /index.html 200 54ms nick

                                         [Jun 10, 12:32] /index.html 200 54ms nick

[Jun 10, 12:32] /index.html 200 54ms nick

Just because I'm browsing my friends activity doesn't mean that I want to waste time trying to follow their god awful timeline with the jumps and the zig zags and the figureing out what came before what.

[ryankirkman]

The Facebook timeline acknowledges that many modern displays have more horizontal real estate than vertical real estate. The design reflects this. It uses much larger visual elements (boxes) than a line of text which means it maximizes its use of both vertical real estate and horizontal real estate.

The other thing you're not considering is that Facebook displays more than just text. If you're displaying images inline as well as text, it's going to be more compact if you interpolate each post in a zig-zag fashion rather than making posts vertically serial.

The example you provided doesn't really illustrate why timeline is bad for a website because it's an example provided in a completely different context.

tl;dr Website design is not command line interface design.