My First Thoughts on Facebook Timeline

Announced today, Facebook is completely overhauling its profiles with Facebook Timeline.

Facebook Timeline is defined as:

The story of your life

• All your stories
• All your apps
• Express who you are

The Facebook Timeline is being portrayed as a new way to express who you are. The cover photo affords you the opportunity to tell the story of who you are without even reading anything about you. You will now be able to visually learn someone’s story just by scrolling through their timeline. For example, a traveler’s timeline versus a chef’s timeline will now jump off the page at you – pictures from around the world and snapshots of delicious food dishes.

Do I personally want to invest the time into documenting my entire life on a social network? I’m not completely convinced right now. Although I do see this as an attempt for Facebook to try to emotionally connect with me, I’m not sure that I’m ready to catalog my life.

Did you miss the f8 conference? You can find the entire recording here: http://f8.facebook.com/

Watch below for an introduction to the Facebook timeline:

Facebook Update: Encourage Fans to Tag Your Business Page in Photos Now

Mashable has announced, starting today (although it hasn’t been completely rolled out yet with all of the details), Facebook users will now be able to tag Pages (products/brands) and People (i.e. celebrities) in their Facebook photos.

What does this mean for your Business Page?

Free advertising! Anyone can tag a Page in a photo, regardless if they Like the page or not. These tagged photos will appear in a Page’s photos page. As you would expect, privacy settings will still apply to whom a user’s photos are exposed to.

How do you take advantage of this feature?

Encourage your fans to tag your Page within their photos. Interact with your fans so that their desire to tag your Page within their photos just happens naturally. For example, if I purchase fitness attire from your Company and I attend a sporting event with a group of friends, take some photos, and tag your Business Page in my photos – your Page has now been exposed with free advertising from me, your customer.

How will you engage your fans to tag your Page in photos?

Image credit: jadendave

Facebook Releases New Send Button Feature

Today Facebook launched yet another value-added feature, the Send Button. The Facebook Developers website explains, “The Send Button allows your users to easily send your content to their friends. People will have the option to send your URL in an inbox message to their Facebook friends, to the group wall of any Facebook group they are a member of, and as an email to any email address. While the Like Button allows users to share your content with all of their friends, the Send Button allows them to send a private message to just a few friends. The message will include a link to the URL specified in the send button, along with a title, image, and short description of the link.”

The Send Button is intended to focus on private more so than public sharing. Designed as the Like Button companion, this new feature will also support the strides Facebook has been making to improve the Facebook Groups feature.

With over 500 million active Facebook users, will this feature eliminate the need for the near archaic, “Email to a Friend” button? Is this the end of “Email to a Friend” as we know it? Based on the momentum Facebook has shown, I’m thinking yes is a safe bet. There really is no benefit to “Email to a Friend” now when you can share a piece of content with your group of friends within a social platform. What does this mean for businesses? Now you have even more incentive to produce really amazing content that people naturally want to share.

Say Farewell to the Facebook Share Button

After a newly released update from Facebook, we must all now say farewell to the share button as we know it. The former Like button used to simply have a link appear in your recent activity whereas now, selecting the Like button will display a full story with a headline, blurb and thumbnail on your wall. Malorie Lucich, Facebook Spokeswoman, states while Facebook will continue to support the Share button, the recommended solution moving forward is, Like. This change applies to both third-party sites and on the developer documentation site.


Personally, “Like” and “Share” are two different functions for me. I “Like” things more frequently than “Share”. Will my willingness to Like something as a user now change? Absolutely. In contrast, for advertisers – this could be an additional means for increasing traffic to your website as this change will ultimately give additional, prominent exposure to your Facebook community.

How do you feel about this change?

Understanding Facebook Facial Recognition

Facebook states 99% of people using Facebook have uploaded at least one photo; more than 100 million photos are uploaded every day. With this in mind, Facebook has now announced it will soon upgrade its ‘Facebook Photos’ feature with their facial recognition technology. Vice President of Product for Facebook, Chris Cox, explains "We wanted to make our Photos product not suck. The addition of facial recognition is another step in that overhaul.”

Facebook has posed this feature as an upgrade to the manual process of uploading and tagging photos. Basically, Facebook’s recognition technology will automatically suggest friends within photos when the technology is confident enough to provide suggestions. This feature called, Tag Suggestions, is an attempt to simplify Facebook photo tagging as Chris Cox described. It’s important to note, you can opt-out of being auto-suggested. To do this simply go into your privacy settings and disable the feature “Suggest Photos of Me to Friends”.

Do you feel this feature is a benefit or simply another privacy concern?

image credit: smanography