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Facebook’s Timeline: it’s not all bad news

According to Facebook’s marketing machine, the Timeline is designed to be a “story of your life”, collecting everything you’ve done within the social networking sphere and dumping it all onto a single screen.

Actually, “dumping” is a little unfair: it collates rather than dumps, with more popular and relevant things taking priority, and it will be spread over several screens if you’re a Facebook veteran.

The Timeline rolls your old profile page and “Wall” into a single entity, and you now have no choice but to accept it or leave Facebook.Follow us,
here some people I know hated the idea so much they’ve packed their handbags and scarpered, but most have hung around and realised it isn’t really so bad after all.

Personally, I like its new look and think that much of the privacy furore has been overblown essentially, any of your posts that were visible before are still visible now.

Your older posts, previously lost in the mists of online time, are now easier to find by a quick click on the year button on the right of the Timeline frame, which jumps to that period.

Privacy tweaking

That might mean you need to do a bit of privacy tweaking, if the way you’re using Facebook now is very different from the way you did in the past  for example, there might be posts that were suitable for one circle of friends that aren’t now what you want your current circle of business contacts to see, Or perhaps you’ve grown up and are embarrassed by your past activities.

So how do you deal with such matters in the new Timeline?First you need to understand that privacy expectations have changed over the years, so posts you were once happy to have shared on a “public” basis may now be better restricted to the eyes of only your friends.

The first thing I did after I converted to the Timeline was to make use of its “Limit past posts” function.Navigate to your privacy settings via the dropdown menu using the arrow to the right of the Home link at the top of the screen, then select the “Manage Past Post Visibility” link in the “Limit the Audience for Past Posts” section.

From here you can change all the content that’s previously been shared with the public (or friends of friends) to being shared with friends only. Hitting the “Limit past posts” button won’t stop anyone who’s already seen the stuff, but it hides your post history from folk you may not want to see it from now on.

Since the Timeline combines previous Profile and Wall information, it’s pretty easy both to see a lot of stuff about yourself and to restrict who else can see it.

 

If you’re worried by all your job history, relationship status changes, friendship data, photos and status updates being on display, restrict who can see what by clicking the dropdown menu next to each such entry and applying the filtering options – hiding the entry from the Timeline will do just that and prevent it from being seen by others, while deleting it removes that entry altogether.

No deleting

Deletion doesn’t work for certain content types, however, so you can’t use this route for friend acceptances, nor for your date of birth, and the Timeline cover photo/banner you choose can only be updated and not hidden completely.

Privacy concerns aside, I’d suggest you take the opportunity that the introduction of the Timeline provides to tidy up your Facebook experience a little

Depending on just how long you’ve been on Facebook, how active you’ve been during that time, and how paranoid you are about keeping stuff private, this job could take a while – but the point is that it can be done, and it’s in your power to hide pretty well anything you want.

If you posted something on someone else’s Wall, and they don’t care about their privacy, those posts became public by proxy and you can’t hide them since they’re not on your Timeline.

However, you can delete them. Use the Activity Log to see all your posts by date, and then go through this list and delete anything you’ve posted on someone else’s Wall, which will remove it from their Timeline.

Tidy up your friends

Privacy concerns aside, I’d suggest you take the opportunity that the introduction of the Timeline provides to tidy up your Facebook experience a little.

Go to the Friends section and hover over the name of each in turn, selecting the Friends button that appears in the box that pops up. From here you can configure whether their posts appear in your news feed, and more to the point what types of posts they make appear there.

This can help reduce clutter tremendously, especially if you have a friend who’s always posting photos you’re not interested in, or is addicted to those stupid game apps that insist on posting how many points they’ve accrued or stars they’ve earned.

Source:PC Pro

 

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