Facebook begins rolling out ‘Timeline’ profile redesign

Published 4:00 am Friday, December 16, 2011

Remember those karaoke videos from three years ago that somehow wound up on Facebook? They were embarrassing for the few hours they spent at the top of your Facebook profile, and then they were buried under a cascade of updates.

But Thursday, Facebook started rolling out a feature called Timeline that makes a user’s entire history of photos, links and other things shared on Facebook accessible with a single click. This may be the first moment that many of Facebook’s 800 million members realize just how many digital bread crumbs they have been leaving on the site — and on the Web in general.

For better or worse, the new format is likely to bring back a lot of memories. But it could also make it harder to shed past identities — something people growing up with Facebook might struggle with as they move from high school to college and from there to the working world.

“There’s no act too small to record on your permanent record,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor at Harvard who studies how the Internet affects society. “All of the mouse droppings that appear as we migrate around the Web will be saved.”

The old Facebook profile page shows the most recent items users have posted, along with things like photos of them posted by others. But Timeline creates a scrapbooklike montage, assembling photos, links and updates for each month and year since they signed up for Facebook.

When Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and chief executive of Facebook, introduced Timeline in September at a developer conference, he described it as a way to get a more comprehensive portrait of someone than by simply reading updates or looking at a profile picture: “We think it’s an important next step to help tell the story of your life.”

Facebook said in a blog post that users could either wait to receive a notification about Timeline on their pages or go to facebook.com/about/timeline to activate it immediately. Eventually all profiles will be switched to the new look, although the company is not saying when. And there will be no switching back.

Some tech-savvy users have been able to reach Timeline for weeks using a workaround meant for developers.