Facebook Will Now Shove the Horrid Past in Your Face
Get ready: All of your old Facebook stuff is getting spectacular new life. Facebook just announced a massive profile overhaul that dredges up your past status updates, wall posts and photos to create a massive "Timeline" of things you never wanted to remember in the first place.
Timeline is your current Facebook wall on steroids, stretched back to encompass your entire Facebook career. At today's F8 developer's conference, where the redesign was unveiled, Mark Zuckerberg billed Timeline as the perfect way to "tell the whole story of your life in a single page."
And they do mean the whole story! Timeline fixes a problem absolutely no one was clamoring about: That your old status updates, wall posts and photo comments get buried on your Facebook wall within a few days, only accessible through hundreds of "earlier" clicks. Now it's all in your timeline; you can scroll back infinitely, or click on individual years to bring up your Facebook activity from then.
So, scroll back four years, and Timeline will pull up the exact moment you changed your relationship status from "single" to "in a relationship." Scroll up a few months later, and you can reminisce on the dejected drunken wall post you left on your girlfriend's wall after she dumped you for the guy on the polo team. I mean, haven't you been absolutely dying to pore through yours and your friends old Facebook content? Up until now, you had to buy a physical, printed book if you wanted to chuckle anew at one of your classic Simpsons quote status update from 2008.
The good news: You can control exactly how much of your past turns up on your Timeline. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got five years of Facebook status updates to purge.