today at Facebook's F8 developers conference, Mark Zuckerberg made one of the smartest plays with Facebook since adding the Like button to everything on the web - he announced Timeline. Timeline allows Facebook users to view their Facebook contributions from the beginning of their accounts, and earlier, on a clever and attractive timeline - like a patchwork autobiography. Timeline isn't an amazingly novel idea (i mean, even i had the idea a year ago) but it is one that i truly believe can add at least another 2 - 5 years to social networking's reign as a supreme technology and i will explain why.
this summer saw reports of declines in use in social networking sites with the term "Facebook fatigue" being coined and endorsed by CNN. this is pretty understandable. apart from sharing photos of pets and newborns, and less noble pursuits like stalking and snooping on friends or friends-of-friends, the novelty of Facebook as a social sharing medium has grown a little thin. we can only poke a friend so many times before it gets old. Facebook's most valuable commercial enterprise apart from ads is online gaming, which again while entertaining, offers no substantive value to the end user. the only other real value Facebook has is allowing friends to share content that they've liked on other sites with other friends, but there are so many vehicles to achieve the same thing, Facebook hardly has much of an edge on that (apart from its ever-increasing user base). so how can Facebook be made relevant and valuable to users after they graduate high school/depart university, etc.?
Facebook has discovered that the information that we Facebook users have been loading it full of over the past years has personal, historical value to its users. i stopped keeping a diary when i turned 15, and now that i am… older than 15, i am finding it harder and harder to keep track of the things that i've been doing and have done. So when i get the opportunity to look back at the past 3-4 years that i've spent injecting Facebook with status updates, wall photos, relationship updates, random profanity, and other sundry posts and messages, i find that i've got for myself a pretty sweet little autobiography that i can use with to-the-second certainty to identify exactly what i was doing/thinking/eating/drinking/liking at that point when i was updating Facebook. it's as if all of those fleeting and extemporaneous thoughts that I had in-the-moment to be released and forgotten ever after, were gathered up and marvelled at as a mosaic-tiled narrative.
"ok - so what?" you are probably thinking to yourself. who cares that my Facebook content is now ordered chronologically? well, for me anyway, and apparently the geers at Facebook agree, it makes Facebook a valuable tool to ME as opposed to my network and i can now choose to contribute to it because i want to extend the narrative that i have been creating for the past four years and improve its quality and fidelity, especially now that the tool is much better designed to do it. i am no longer motivated to update my status because i want my community to be aware of what i am doing - i am motivated to update my status because i want FUTURE ME, of my future wife, or future children or whoever to be aware of what i WAS DOING at this point in history.
and Facebook went one very clever step farther. with its Open Graph API, launch partners are able to add their apps to the timeline from day one, so that your Spotify data can feed a part of the history, or what you were watching on Netflix. Zuckerberg demonstrated integration with Nike Plus, which i have also been using forever - and having that data integrated makes Timeline even more authoritative. the potential is really vast.
obviously, there are significant challenges to be faced by Facebook Timeline. people are already concerned with how much control they have over their private information and the permissions they can give to others to view their content. Timeline seems to be a way of getting users to pour even MORE personal information than they would normally place on Facebook - even going so far as to prompt users to add photos, videos, and notes about their own birth, or other significant life events. i'm not sure how much even i like that idea, and i love the idea of Timeline tremendously.
privacy and security concerns notwithstanding, evolving social networking and sharing into a personal micro-history generator is simply brilliant. so many of the young generation's best moments have already been captured online in social sites so when they turn on Timeline, their autobiographies will be so much more robust than my generation's, and so much more meaningful. i have a hard time believing that any of us will be able to see the reflection of our personal histories presented in a slick new interface and quickly turn away from it… at least not without thinking twice.
- g
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