Four months after Facebook rolled out Timeline in September of 2011, a Sophos poll revealed that more than half of Facebook users were “worried” by the site’s makeover. Why? Well, Timeline encourages users to put more of their life on the site. Much more.
At the F8 Developers Conference in 2011, Timeline was pitched as a beautiful and easy way for users to view posts and statuses from long ago. But Timeline serves as more than a convenient time machine: it also makes it possible for users to fill in gaps in their past on the social network, then show off or highlight events of interest. Facebook wants everybody’s life stories, and it wants everything.
By clicking anywhere on the tall vertical blue line (literally, the “timeline”) that unifies every thread of your social networking past, using a form, one can fill in life details such as “Retirement,” “Expecting a Baby,” “New Pet,” “Loss of a Loved One,” “Home Improvement,” “New Vehicle,” “Became an Organ Donor,” “Quit a Habit,” “Weight Loss,” “Removed Braces,” and “Changed Beliefs.” Talk about personal! This function supplements the more mundane option of backdating a status update, photo post, or place check-in, likewise, by inserting the entry into its appropriate position on your timeline.
Gone are the days of simply, “What’s on your mind?”, the quintessential status update prompt. Now Facebook has access to a multitude of biographical snippets, if users care to polish their online diaries to a high degree of completeness. This is obviously a lucrative move for them and advertising agencies. Much like Target profited from tracking which customers were pregnant women, Facebook can benefit advertising clients by providing data — specific to the date — on which users have experienced various life events. With Timeline, ads can target only those users who are known to have “Tattoos or Piercings,” or have learned a “New Language,” or have “Glasses, Contacts…,” or have “Overcome an Illness.” The possibilities for ads are endless.
Timeline is no more an invasion of privacy than any other content-sharing or -aggregating feature on the network. By giving Facebook access to your life journal, you are implicitly giving the site permission to share your information with advertisers in the same way it always has. Yet users are uncomfortable with — even worried by — the feature. Though I can provide only anecdotal evidence, I have seen a near-zero-percent adoption rate of the “Life Events” component of Timeline. Barely anybody uses it. Maybe it’s the depth of information that users are being asked to share. Perhaps its Facebook’s stilted and oddly-chosen prompts that unsettle users. Or simply lack of interest could be to blame — most don’t have the time or impetus to transform their Facebook pages into varnished diaries.
Personally, I feel no pressing need to add the details of my life story to Timeline with detached impunity. If a friend wants to know when I lost a loved one, or had my first kiss, they can ask me that in person.
In other news, Facebook has admitted that “too much birthday cake is unhealthy… so birthday cake is a lot like Facebook.” Say what?