When I first found out about Facebook Timeline, I was horrified. I ranted to anyone near me about it while the wound was still fresh. That was for about a day.
When I first found out about Facebook Timeline, I was horrified. I ranted to anyone near me about it while the wound was still fresh. That was for about a day. It wasn’t the layout, because I secretly thought the cover picture looked pretty cool… it was the creepy, stalker-friendly way anyone could click on a year of your Facebook life and see everything you had done! Old photos, cringe-worthy posts from friends in Year 11, effusive statuses that I wrote before I realised there is nothing wrong with spelling properly and using capitals…
The media have been talking about Employers and Facebook for a while now. Scary articles entitled with phrases like, ‘You just lost out on a job because of Facebook!’ or ‘Employers are looking at your Facebook!’ I’m not so bothered about that aspect, not right now, but I’m careful what I put on my Facebook anyway. I’m not one to detail my mood swings every 5 minutes and I don’t have any wild photos I wouldn’t want my Mum to see. So what was my problem? I felt an uncomfortable exposure at the idea of people being able to easily click through my entire Facebook history. People change, and in those years of faithfulness to Facebook I had changed. I didn’t even want to know what I had been writing on Facebook 5 years ago, never mind my friends seeing it.
So my original reaction was horror. I even thought about deleting my Facebook account and starting afresh. But then I decided that was too much hassle and in an act of defiance to Facebook I decided to get Timeline before it was forced upon me. Keep your enemies close, as they say. I decided to hide all my old posts and it was definitely an interesting trip down memory lane! People I had forgotten I had deleted years ago surfaced once more. I read old posts and statuses with amusement. There wasn’t actually too much to hide, and suddenly I was free to enjoy Timeline without any baggage.
I’ve had Timeline for a few months now and I would love to say it has been a beautiful relationship with no issues. But I can’t lie to you. I still love the cover picture, I think it looks great and takes the focus off profile pictures. But the layout is not great despite all of Facebook’s tweaks. I can live with Timeline, but I do find it annoying how quickly my posts disappear down the wall and are lost to public viewing (except to my most persistent of stalkers). On the other hand it is interesting to see what I’ve done in one month, and I like that my photos are separated into years. Also being able to hide things from your wall, or highlight them to be more obvious is a good feature.
As for my fears of people stalking my life through the years? Well, I have never bothered to click on any of my friends past years and I doubt they have clicked on mine because really, who wants to know? Facebook is all about the present. Instant communication, finding out what’s happening now, sharing your most recent pictures and planning events for the future! Who is really bothered about what you did two years ago? I think Facebook Timeline has good and bad to it but Facebook is going to keep evolving and we are going to have to keep evolving with it, so let’s embrace Timeline and stop hating.
