Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a slew of new changes to his social media creation Thursday at the Facebook’s fifth annual f8 Conference in San Francisco.
The most dramatic change is to users’ homepages.
According to Zuckerberg, “The Timeline” is a new profile layout designed to allow people to better control what kind of information they share with their friends while continuing to encourage people to share information online. Integrating the recent friends listing updates with a more comprehensive way to see what information they’ve posted, “Timeline,” he added, is Facebook’s latest way to better represent a person online..
“Millions of people curate stories of their lives on Facebook every day and have no way to share them once they fall off your profile page,” he said at the keynote for the conference. With the ability to store updates and apps, as well as a better graphic interface, “Timeline” is “the story of your life and completely new way to express yourself.”
Along with the new layout comes a new class of apps and verbs, similar to the “Like” button, to express your daily activity on Facebook. A partnership with music-sharing service Spotify will let people “Listen” to music with their friends, for instance, and Netflix will share streaming content online to let people “Watch” movies.
Other cosmetic changes, which Facebook rolled out days before the f8 Conference, include larger photo thumbnails, the ability to list friends (similar to the Google+ “Circles”), and, to the consternation of multiple Facebook users, a ticker that displays Facebook “Friends” activity instantaneously.