Mike Andrew Consulting

Facebook forces users to change profiles

By mike, Jan 27 in blog with 0 comments

Facebook will start requiring people to switch to a new profile format known as Timeline, making photos, links and personal musings from the past much easier to find.

Timeline is essentially a scrapbook of the user’s whole life, compared with a snapshot of today found on Facebook’s traditional profile page. Once activated, Timeline replaces the current profile.

Although some people have already voluntarily switched to Timeline, Facebook has started making the change mandatory. It is telling some users they have seven days to clean up their profiles before Timeline gets automatically activated. Facebook is rolling out the requirement to others over the next few weeks.

At some point, even those who have not logged on in a while will be automatically switched.

Timeline does not expose anything that was not available for sharing in the past, but it allows people to jump to older material more quickly.

A party photo a user posted in 2008 to a small group of friends would be more visible to relatives, bosses and others they may have added as friends since then.

Facebook users can change privacy settings on individual items to control who has access. Private information can be made visible only to the profile owner, a select group or deleted completely.

Timeline allows users to click on a star to feature major life events more prominently.

Besides the user’s traditional profile photo – the headshot – they can add what Facebook calls a cover photo.

Users who want to edit their profile should click on the ‘activity log’ to see all their posts at a glance and make changes to them one by one.

About the author

Mike Andrew has been working with the Internet and small business for over 12 years. Mike has been a keynote speaker at conventions and seminars and conducted social media training sessions all over the world. Mike has an extensive media background having worked in electronic media for over 30 years. Mike specialises in social media and Internet marketing strategy, SEO techniques and search engine marketing campaigns. His articles appear on numerous blogs around the web as well as national magazines.