Some Thoughts on Timeline

Don't have Facebook Timline yet?  You're not alone.  98.4% of my friends list doesn't have it, either.  It remains unclear when everyone will be making the shift, but before you change over, let me offer you my brief overview:

1.  Clearly this was Zuckerberg sitting around one day thinking, Facebook doesn't do enough to let you stalk people already.  Because oh-em-gee TIMELINE.  You can stalk the FUCK out of people with Timeline.

2.  The whole concept of having a cover photo at the top of your page is pretty cool...if you have any design sense whatsoever.  Which most people don't.  I think about people on my friends list who, like, can barely spell their own names and I can't even fathom them coming up with a classy jpeg that's exactly 851 pixels wide by 315 pixels high.  This can't end well...

Zuckerberg filled up his Timeline with some puppies and shit.

I, on the other hand, decided to make my Timeline look like MySpace.

3.  The friends list thing!  Dude!  It's so weird now!  With the "classic" profile look, you have twenty friends displayed in the sidebar and the list changes every twelve or twenty-four hours.  With Timeline, you have six friends at the top of your page and also a "randomized" friends list with all of your friends, both of which rearrange somewhat every time you refresh, but not enough for it actually to be random.

4.  How does Facebook choose who to display on your friends list?!  (That's the kind of shit I think about when I should be thinking about literally anything else on Earth because anything else would be more worthy of my time.  Timeline has made my curiosity worse.)  

5.  Timeline keeps throwing out awesome stories from my past and replacing them with less awesome stories.  I thought I had 2009 perfect.  I mean, totally golden.  Then BAM, the picture of me and Julia drinking in the kitchen during Senior Week was gone and a link to a bombastically weepy blog entry I wrote about Obama's inauguration was in its place.  What the hell?

6.  I barely remember writing that blog entry.  But Facebook remembers.  Nothing is safe with Timeline.  Nothing.  You just don't even know what crazy stuff from your past is going to randomly pop up and force you to stop and think about how simple your life used to be.  And remember, when everyone switches over, all of your friends will see all of this crap.

7.  Timeline creepily tabulates your friending activity.  238 people wrote on my wall in 2007.  I mean, what the fuck, who fucking cares?

8.  It also tells you how many people wrote on your wall for your birthday each year, which, I can already see, is going to be a one-way ticket to resentment and crippling insecurity.

Timeline handily makes your life look more interesting than it actually is by juxtaposing pictures with exciting links and wall posts on either side of an arbitrary divider.

9.  Timeline has a little box thingy at the top that shows your number of "Likes" and has a visual representation of your last two.  I really don't like to "Like" that many things because as soon as you "Like" something, you get all of that "Like"'s stupid updates in your newsfeed.  But until I "Like" something else, I'm stuck with Stephen Gyllenhaal's dumbass face staring at me every time I look at my profile since I "Liked" Cantara's book.  This is something I don't "Like" about how Timeline handles "Likes."

10.  Really and truly, out of all the things that Facebook has come up with, Timeline sucks the least horribly.  I only have five friends who have it right now, but of those five, I've spent the most time looking at...my own profile.  Because Timeline has reminded me that I lived other days before I lived this one, and that day was just as boringly normal as today is.  And apparently I find that fascinating.

Convincing you that you are in any way interesting:  it's the entire point of Facebook.  Which is why Timeline IS SUPER GREAT.  Or something.  The end.