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Plenty of people are still unwrapping their undies after the move to Facebook’s super-graphical Timeline look—and now the company is ready to mix things up again. Check out what your profile might look like soon.
Looking at the profile of TPM’s Carl Franzen, who already has the new Timeline (apparently in beta testing), the design shift is much cleaner. The largest change is moving your name and vital stats (college, workplace, home location, etc) from underneath the cover photo to right on top of it—superimposed in white text. The image boxes that used to display your friends and most recent photo are now collapsed into a plain text rectangle. The entire upper row is squished considerably.
It’s cleaner, but that’s not always a good thing! Our first eyebrow raise is with the cover flow text—what if your picture has a lot of white space? Or what if it’s something more complex than a picture of a cat? White text isn’t legible spread across just any graphic, and this could lead to some serious readability problems. The loss of seeing your most recently tagged photo and a handful of your friends also makes the tip of the Timeline seem a bit more sterile compared to the OG version from this past fall—and is anyone really creating “Life Events” that would fill out the new Summary tab?
Facebook is probably considering these questions riiiiiight now, and depending on the answers, this overhaul may not ever see light outside of a select few: Franzen says “Facebook declined to specify how many user profiles the new test would involve, as well as whether the new look would eventually be the standard for the website.” [TPM]
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I haven’t even been forced onto Timeline yet.
Not that I’m complaining about that.
It’s actually really decent! I resisted for as long as I could, but now I love it. It’s definitely the best Facebook update we’ve seen so far.
I’ll just wait to see how many months it takes for Facebook to notice I’m not using Timeline and clandestinely update me.
I’ve only rejected the update the once.
Agreed, I quite like it and have never really understood what everyone has against it. I like being able to highlight a status as a life event and having bigger pictures dotted around etc… This new change seems like a good improvement to Timeline, seems a lot cleaner with a lot less wasted space
But to designers it’s not wasted space, it’s white space. They’re different things, with the latter encouraging you to concentrate on the media more.
I’ve always liked timeline though, save for the new way of seeing wall posts. Which I just find much messier than a chronological placement amongst other posts.
I’ve lived with Timeline for a while now and still dislike it. At first it was the two column view that bugged me as it makes it much more difficult to scroll down chronologically. you have to zig-zag your way down. This, however, is nothing compared to the square photo preview ‘feature’. So many of my photos just look weird or even crop out the main subject. I know you can reposition the image but that doesn’t always improve things that much and just seems like unnecessary work. Also, you can’t do this on the mobile app (iPhone) so is extra annoying. I think they just copied Instagram without really thinking about it. Just display the images without cropping. Problem solved!
I love timeline, and I like this new updated version, hope I get it soooon
Mine already looks like that. It’s quite nice.
An interesting change, one I would probably go for. But seeing how they are pretty similar, Facebook should just offer a small option between the two that can be toggled at will.
that looks quite good actually, latest updates have been good instead of wank lately.
Stop worrying about Timeline for now, Facebook, and get your News Feed sorted out!
Honestly, it looks a mess when compared to Timeline, which looks, generally, great. My News Feed is full of spam with people saying ‘LIKE if you think’ so and so, or ‘LIKE for a punch’.
Also, Facebook for iPad is still a mess – Timeline still isn’t available, Chat rarely works, and now they’ve gone and made every picture on the News Feed huge so as to show off their Instagram purchase, despite the fact that most of the pictures I see are those of mangled bodies due to people being thinking their ‘like’ is going to save someone’s life. It isn’t, and most of the images are stock photos anyway. Why haven’t I just stopped using Facebook, I hear you cry? Well, I much prefer Twitter, but every now and again I do have to catch up on homework with people who aren’t on Twitter.
I wish they’d listen to me. But I know they won’t.
Agreed. Profiles actually look quite good now, but the rest of the site lacks uniformity. Hopefully the design shift that Timeline has presented will trickle through into the rest of the site, but we’ve been waiting a while now and still no real change. :<
Sounds like you need new friends really. Or at least get rid of the ones that don’t know how to use the internet yet.
yeah. what is this “‘LIKE for a punch’.” thing? is that normal?!
It’s just people who have lives which revolve around getting likes, using people’s conscience to make themselves ‘popular’.
The thing is, it’s not the same people all the time – if I deleted everyone who ever did it, I’d have about ten active friends left.