Facebook Timeline - A Review

So last week Mark Zuckerburg announced that facebook will be giving all the profiles a major upgrade in the next little while called Timeline. Now I was lucky enough to find away in to developers beta (aka I made a developers account... everyone needs to try my unfinshed broken app called "Hello World :P ), likely if your remotely connected to the tech world you already know what timeline is all about, for thoses of you that dont heres a short discription.

Your facebook profile will now be a timeline. 

Now for my review. 

Timeline is, in my mind, a fundmental shift in facebook, and heres what I mean by that. Timeline is the entire history of your life from birth to seaming your untimely demise. Your profile is designed to show off all your life milstones ( or as I come to call them achevments (a la xbox style)), so on my page you can see when i was born, when i entered school or graduated, when i moved, or something special happend to me, and each of these events are highlighted and easy to see when you scroll threw my timeline. 

So what does this mean for privacy? I'm no securty expert, and I wont pretend to be, but the level of access that your friends will have to your entire life history is unreal. Although Facebook as implmented some rather beefy privacy things in there so only spscific friends or groups of friends will have access to your entire timeline and heres where I see that fundmental change coming in.

Facebook, in the eyes of a good majority of the population, looks like a place for people to broadcast to the world, But its not anymore... if it ever was to begin with.  Facebook now isnt a soapbox for us to broadcast from, its a couch for us to share our lifes, photos, & events to use as if we are always siting around with our friends updating them on what we've been up to. We dont do that with eveyone in our lives so what i see happening when timeline drops is that our network of friends will get smaller, but our connection with those friends will get stronger. 

All in all Timeline is awesome, a few bugs here and there but they seam to be smoothing them out quickly. You will spend atleast an hour, maybe more, looking threw your own life on facebook when Timeline starts shipping on September 30th. 

Brian