Remember that time you kicked your dad in the face at the pool? Facebook does.
Two weeks ago at Facebook f8 (the company’s annual conference) Mark Zuckerberg unveiled Timeline, the new format for Facebook profiles that aims to “tell your life story” in a single page. The new layout offers you a vertically-scrolling profile spanning your entire Facebook-existence. You can pick a year, a month, even a single day, and instantly see your activity for that date: pictures, status updates, events, wall-posts: every aspect of your life that you chose to conduct through the site.
Timeline will be released to the general public over the coming weeks but if, like me, you’re a little bit curious about the whole thing then follow this link for instructions on getting the feature early (it takes about 5 minutes to complete). Even though I’d call myself – for want of a less idiotic sounding phrase – a Facebook-sceptic I was impressed by the whole setup. The integration of your information is automatic, the interface is slick, and, well, it’s just fun. Who hasn’t had the occasional wander through the backlog of their photo albums, grinning and grimacing at old photos and friends; Timeline makes this feel like a little adventure – a pleasant mugging down memory lane.
This is exactly the pitch that Facebook are going for. Their promotional video for the project reminded me of that brilliantly manipulative John Lewis advert (which still raises the hairs at the back of my neck, goddamn it), and follows a recent trend for tech companies to encourage you to live online more with the promise that the mess of everyday lives will be transformed into neat narratives (see also Google’s ‘Dear Hollie’ advert for Gmail).The reaction to Timeline so far has been quite typical: a small pitchfork-and-torch mob shouting “BRING BACK OLD FACEBOOK!!!”, concerns about the implications for individuals’ privacy, and snarky criticisms about the egotism Timeline will encourage. The security problem is certainly worse than the old Facebook – with Timeline encouraging you to fill in the details of your past life think how many ‘secret questions’ could be answered with a scroll down your profile (‘Where was your first school?’, ‘What was the name of your first pet?’) – but this isn’t really a new hazard for the site. Ditto casual egomania. We all make judgments about people based on their profiles – whether consciously or not – Timeline will just aggravate this effect as people begin to edit their past lives. Significant other you’d rather forget about? The pictures never existed. Transformative gap-year that doesn’t get enough press? Act casual, plot a map, and link in your photos. [Insert Name Here], this is your life!
But Timeline is more than just a toy – it’s a fantastically well-calculated move that will imbed the already-ubiquitous website even more firmly into the fabric of modern society. As a standalone application Timeline is simply a smart update, but Zuckerberg has paired it with new Facebook Gestures – a system that will ask you to sign in to a website (the Guardian, for example, has already offered this) and then publish on your feed everything you access through that website (though you can change this with privacy settings). This is not just about increasing site traffic for Facebook; it’s about encouraging you to live more of your life online and through the site. Facebook asks you to voluntarily surrender information and then sells this information on in the form of targeted advertisements – this made the company $1.86 billion in 2010 (though that figure should be kept in proportion; Google’s ad revenue for the same year was $30 billion).
Mark Zuckerberg shows off his own Timeline at f8.
It is easy to analyse this move in a cynical fashion: by encouraging users to publish more of their interests and activities through Timeline and Gestures, Facebook are simply refining their product; they’re cashing in on individuals’ sense of nostalgia for their own financial gain. And this is true. But it doesn’t mean there won’t be other, more interesting, consequences. Facebook’s revenue model means they have to force users to maintain a static and persistent identity online; one that is likely to be connected with the ‘real’ you – via address, or phone number, or bank details. When such single-internet-identities are suggested by governments they’re always going to be met with distrust, but when you’re just signing up for a social site – Chat with friends! Share photos! – the concept seems less dangerous. Once the idea has become naturalised in public opinion, what’s to stop governments endorsing private identity schemes? The interesting thing is that no-one can predict the effects such schemes would have on contemporary society: new battle-grounds for privacy perhaps? Our sense of self becoming dependant on an online persona? I guess we’ll just have to see where the Timeline leads.
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