Saturday, December 3, 2011

Why you should activate the new Facebook profile setting – the “Facebook Timeline” Copyright by Indu Nanayakkara

You can love or hate or just be ‘meh’ over the new changes on facebook profiles that were launched during the last week’s f8 developers conference (go ahead and click the link if you’d like to see the recording). But instead of waiting around for the automatic update of your profile from the old to the new – Timeline profile, it would be a good idea to activate the new Timeline now.

Here’s what mine look like:


Although you won’t get to see it on my profile just yet!

Why should I activate my facebook profile to the new Timeline? I already hate it!

Well, whether you and I love it or hate it, Facebook is going to activate it this week. When you activate the new timeline, Facebook says:
Welcome to Your Timeline – Developer Release
Your timeline currently features your top photos and posts. Right now, only you can see what’s here. Take a tour and star, hide or add whatever you want. Then click Publish Now or wait until your timeline goes live on Thursday, September 29, 2011.
So, unless you are planning on abandoning Facebook and deleting your profile altogether or something, my humble opinion is that you should activate the new Timeline now! So that you can check on what’s visible and what’s private and be comfortable with your profile before Facebook activates it on the 29th.
When I activated mine, I realized that anyone can go right to the beginning of my days on Facebook and easily check on anything that’s posted public. The thing is, when we just started using Facebook (Going down the Timeline, I found out that I joined in June 2007, well fancy that!) I don’t think many of us were aware of the privacy settings. Nor did we have a lot of friends and probably didn’t see ourselves ‘friending’ our bosses and colleagues and aunty Netta either. So it’s quite likely that we may have posted status updates, photos, comments that we might not like everyone on Facebook or at least ALL our current friends to view. THIS is why you should take a trip down Facebook Timeline memory lane and check out all your posts as much in detail as you can (that means including your comments on other people’s posts and their comments on your posts) and edit privacy settings to limited or “just you” or even delete them altogether.
As a rule of thumb, you should look at a post and think, Is it okay if my mom, my boss, my haters, my partner/spouse seeing this? If it’s cool, then leave it. Otherwise, change visibility settings or just delete it. It would save you loads of trouble and headache and even heartache later on. Trust me!

How do I activate the new Facebook Timeline?

So having said that, here’s how you can activate your new Timeline without waiting for the official unveiling. There are some pretty good post out there. I followed the one on TechCrunch but there are so many out there like the one on Mashable.
But one of the easiest ways to do it is actually watching how its been done. So here’s a pretty good YouTube video on how to activate your Facebook Timeline.


Facebook timeline profile activation procedure

If that doesn’t work for you, here’s another YouTube video on it with step by step instructions.
Oh, before I forget it… do anything on your new profile but DON’T click on the green button on top that says “Publish Now” until you’re absolutely positively sure that everything on your new profile is ready to go out there in public. Just a bit of advice ;)
So, you might as well get started with it now. Today is already the 26th and trust me it will take you at least a couple of days to clean up your act, if you’ve been on Facebook as long as I have. So happy cleaning! :D




2 comments:

these steps arent working for me. did facebook recently block this loophole to getting timeline?

no brother there re no any error its still working for everyone try again...

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