UPDATE (19/12/11) - As you probably realised soon after we wrote this, Facebook then sat on the launch of Timeline while they ironed out a few bugs. It's available now for anyone to enable on their profile by going to: https://www.facebook.com/about/timeline A few weeks back when the Google+ field trial launched, we speculated that Facebook might have some catching up to do. And now in the week that Google+ finally became available to all comers, Facebook has launched a string of new features. The first few sparking a storm of complaint and controversy and culminating in a whole new look for the Facebook Profile called Timeline.
The small changes that have been made in the past couple of weeks included the ability to subscribe to a users updates without actually connecting them with as a friend, better per post privacy (just like Google+) and more visibly a new mini stream of latest updates in the top right corner of the chat sidebar. Typically users of social networks tend to be resistant to change, they know what they like and can often take a while to see the value of new features. And news feeds have been abuzz with users expressing how much they hate the new status feed and that it just duplicates their existing news feed. However, it starts to make a lot more sense in the light of the new Timeline view, which makes the news feed a lot less prominent in the profile, making the sidebar updates suddenly a lot more useful. As I write the Timeline view is only available to Facebook Developers, but will begin roll out to everyone next Friday (expect a wave of status updates from happy and less happy friends at that point!)
So what's this Timeline view all about then?
Facebook seem to be trying to move users toward seeing their profile less as a news feed of the here and now, and more as a scrapbook. One central place to store memories, photos and stories. They're even encouraging users to start filling that timeline out from before Facebook even existed...even as far back as the users birth! (So those cutesy profiles friends setup for their newborns suddenly make a lot more sense too.) The new features that make up the timeline are the Cover, Profile Apps, Life Events and Widescreen. Let's take a look at each in turn...
The Cover
Probably the most obvious change when you first convert to the Timeline view is the very large cover image that appears at the top of your profile. You can use any existing image Facebook has of you, or upload a new one, and there are some basic tools for aligning the image to take a landscape slice out to fit the space available. Over the next few weeks we're likely to see some really creative uses of this space, in the same way that users took to the 5 picture gallery on the old profile to build creative mosaics.
Life Events
The update also sees a new kind of status update, which seems specifically designed to encourage users to treat their profile more like a personal living history or lifestream (to use a horrible buzzword). Life Events create an enormous box in your timeline as you might expect for something that represents a significant milestone. Life event categories include Work (Graduation, Jobs, Military Service), Family (Engagements, Marriage, Childbirth, Pets, Bereavement!), Living (Moving house, buying a house, roommates, cars), Health (Breaking a bone! Surgery, Getting well from an illness) and finally Milestones (Learning a language, Getting a licence, Travel and Awards).
Widescreen View
By default the timeline runs down the middle of your profile, with status update and other speech bubbles sprouting off it to the left and right. However, each panel when hovered over has a star button, which when clicked makes that update a featured one. This puts it into widescreen view, taking up the full width of the profile. A great way to pull out the big events and make them more obvious.
Profile Apps
Where things get really interesting though (at least for a geek like me) is the new class of Facebook Apps that are part of the timeline profile format. As always your Friends, Photos, Videos and so on are mini apps. They're joined by a new Map app, which shows all of your location checkins and a whole raft of third-party apps which hook into the Facebook Open Graph to show actions you've taken elsewhere in the context of your timeline. For example the Spotify app shows the music you're listening to, in a timeline bubble, so that friends can listen along. A Nike+ app can show when you've completed a run, a Cookery app might share a recipe you've made. The reason this is interesting, is that Facebook have further opened up the Social Graph to developers to enable these kind of apps, they're all built around Actions that a user can take like: watched a movie, read a book, cooked a recipe. Which when clicked, manifest themselves as Timeline items. So where Facebook used to revolve around "Liking" things, that vocabulary just got the potential to be a lot bigger!
So how does this apply to recruitment?
Well, at this stage it's up for debate! But as always, a new feature set provides a whole new set of ways for clever folk to start to manipulate them and build new apps on top of them. A couple of ideas that jumped out at us in Chatter HQ: - The new timeline based format can be used to share information from birth to now. Meaning candidates could start to use it as a truly social CV, using the Life events feature to feature the kind of milestones you'd usually expect to see on a résumé. - The new social apps are based around actions. While it's unlikely users would want to share actions like "Jon Applied for a Job" (preferring to keep it secret from their current boss perhaps!) we can see potential uses for referral schemes for example. "Jon recommended a job at xxx" But one thing that's for sure...all those people complaining this week about the relatively tiny changes to Facebook that lead up to this...are going to hit the roof! We'll leave you with the official intro video from Facebook: [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzPEPfJHfKU&w=570]
