Facebook Notes: More Big Changes Ahead

Well, as you may have heard today, yesterday’s major Facebook changes are nothing compared to what’s coming down the pike in a few weeks. I’m too wiped to recap it now, but I watched the whole hour+ f8 video with Mark Zuckerberg’s big announcement, and WOW. I live-blogged my notes on it as I listened in a series of public Facebook posts. If you don’t have FB but your kids do, you’ll want to know about the new developments. Lots of privacy issues to be aware of!

The Zuckerberg video, explaining the new evolution of the Facebook profile: the Timeline.

My notes:

• He says FB sees your profile page as “what you’d show someone in the first conversation you have with them.” Well, that’s a key difference in understanding right there, isn’t it? I’ve never seen my FB profile that way—profile in this context means your wall, your info page, your photos. My understanding of a Facebook wall, and I think I’m not alone in this, is where you share things for people you know, people you’ve allowed access into a more personal side of your life. When I meet a stranger, I don’t immediately launch into a personal narrative or pull out my wedding album…

• Zuckerberg on the original FB profile (one photo, basic info, school, work, relationship): “People loved this product…It was the first place that most people had on the internet where you felt safe expressing your real self.”

• Timeline is an interesting concept—it does address the problem of old status updates disappearing into the ether—but he keeps emphasizing how for previous years/months, Timeline pulls only “the most important events” of your life. So…it’s another case of FB determining what “important” means—just as they’ve been determining which friends appear more often in our news feeds.

The rest of my notes are in this long (public) thread on Facebook. It’s way too long to copy here. 🙂