Oh Facebook. You just up and change everything without telling anyone, acting like you own the site or something. And now we find out that this Ticker and these Subscriptions are just scratching the surface, and you are planning to flip our profile pages inside out and upside down. Do you think that is going to go over well?
Actually, it will probably go over really well. Your new profile page is where the power of the new Facebook is going to shine. You’ll now have the ability to add significant customization, tell the story of your life from birth, and manage the new apps that will connect you with friends and family like never before.
These changes will not be rolled out for a few weeks, but don’t despair: you don’t have to wait if you don’t want to. Lets take a look at the major changes, and then we’ll tell you how you can get your new profile page today.
Covers are the new huge image that takes over the top third of your profile page, and you can fill with whatever you want. Your profile pic can still be whatever you want, but now you can greet people with something besides just your face in a tiny little box.
You couldn’t fit an image so cool in your old profile pic box.
If you want to make something customized, the size of the Cover is 851 x 315 pixels. You can however upload any picture, but so far cropping options are somewhat limited. Either way, you just got some personalization on your profile page separate from your profile pic, and we think that is excellent.
Scroll down past your Cover and you find your posts, photos, and life events organized based on when they happened. This is your Timeline. It is wider than your old profile, and a lot more visual.
You can control what is featured on your timeline; you can make important things bigger and hide other things completely.
If key parts of your life aren’t included because they happened before Facebook, no worries. You can now add them to your timeline, and fill in the gaps from your birth to the last song you just listened to.
It’s like havng a digital scrapbook of your entire life.
You can also skim back through your private activity log, where you’ll find everything you ever shared since you joined Facebook. You can highlight any of these items to showcase them on your timeline, too.
Once you have a snazzy looking cover image and your timeline all backfilled, the logic behind all of the recent changes starts to become apparent. Your profile page is like the digital hub of your life. While you can keep track of your friends on the Ticker, it is on your profile page where the new Facebook really shines, and that light is coming from Apps.
Apps are being developed for this new platform that will allow you and your friends to instantly share the content you enjoy. Listening to a great new song on Spotify? One of your friends can, too. One of your friends is watching the latest episode of your favorite TV show on Hulu? You can, too. Right through Facebook.
Those activities won’t spam your friends newfeeds, but will quickly pop on on the Ticker. But, now your friends can come to your profile page, click on the Music tab, and get a display of every song you’ve ever played using a music service with a Facebook app — like Spotify. From right on your page, your friends and click and play any song you’ve ever listened to.
Never heard of Sleeper Agent? Click and listen!
So if you have a friend with great music taste, you can enjoy their selections anytime you want. Now imagine the same connections for movies, TV show, books, food recipes, hiking routes… the possibilities are limitless. The more you and your friends include and share about your life, the more magical the new Facebook becomes.
And when you are digging through the stacks of your friends music list, having the Ticker by your side so you don’t miss anything suddenly make a lot of sense. Honest, it does.
The new profile pages don’t go live for a few weeks, but you can click here to visit Facebook’s official page about Timeline, scroll to the bottom, and request an early invite. If that is not fast enough for you, than check out the slideshow below and we’ll show you how you can have the new profile page in just a few minutes.
Adrian covers daily news as well as the weekly Law & Apple column for MacLife.com. You can follow him on Twitter, if you want to.
This started annoying me about twenty minutes ago, so I thought I’d write about it to express my discontent with the constant sharing that every app seems to do these days. This kind of constant posting is bound to get me “hidden” by my Facebook friends. Also, unsubscribed to. We wouldn’t want that, now would we?
To disable this annoying function without entirely disconnecting from Facebook, go to Spotify > Preferences in the menu bar. Scroll down to Facebook and uncheck “Get personal recommendations…”
Voila! Now, stop annoying your Facebook friends and get back to the music.
Not crazy about the changes made to Facebook this week? As it turns out, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Mark Zuckerberg took the stage at the company’s F8 event on Thursday to unveil the company’s new direction, which includes a new way to display your life and plenty of music and video content yet to come.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg took to the stage today at the company’s F8 event following a rousing parody by Saturday Night Live cast member Andy Samberg — right down to the hoodie, sandals and mannerisms. (Didn’t anyone tell them we’ve seen this joke before… at an Apple keynote?) While you would think that the social network had exhausted its arsenal of changes for the week after the new Subscribe button and Friends list revisions, those appear to be just the appetizer for the main entrée yet to come.
“Since the beginning of Facebook, your profile has been the place where you tell your story,” explains The Facebook Blog. “People use it to share everything from the small stuff, like their thoughts on an article, to the most important events of their lives, like the photos of their wedding or the birth of their child.”
Needless to say, a user’s profile has evolved over time and soon, you’ll see the biggest change to date with Timeline, with Facebook claims will “tell your story” by focusing on three specific areas: Your stories, your apps and a new way to express who you are, all going back to the time you were born.
“It’s the heart of your Facebook experience, completely re-thought from the ground up,” Zuckerberg explains of the new design, which the CEO claims has been keeping the company busy all year. (No wonder there’s still no native iPad app…)
Where the original Facebook profile design focused on the last few moments in your life (and the 2008 update extended that to the last 15 minutes), Timeline aims to show it all, from birth to the present. Explaining that Timeline was a major design challenge, Zuckerberg showed off the new look at F8 using his own profile, which now appears in a more grid-like layout, presenting only the key moments as you go backward in time.
Timeline also features Reports, a method for compiling your profile data every month or every year as a summary of everything you’ve ever done on Facebook. Timeline will display properly on mobile devices in a condensed view, and new look will roll out over the next couple of months. “We wanted to design a place that feels like your home,” Zuckerberg concluded.
Needless to say, Facebook didn’t stop there, adding “verbs” to your status updates so users can “express themselves in new ways.” For example, you can now post when you’ve done something after the fact, rather than at the exact moment you’re doing it. But fear not, verbs are considered a “lightweight” part of your stream and will appear on the side of your homepage rather than cluttering up your news feed.
Facebook has also overhauled its OpenGraph protocol, opening the doors for developers to include the feature in their own apps with a focus on the Timeline first and discovering new things through your Facebook friends — which leads into the final segment of the F8 event.
As widely rumored, Facebook has now teamed with Spotify for the “real-time serendipity” feature, allowing you to share music with friends and even listen along at the same time they do. The feature isn’t exclusive to Spotify, and Facebook is partnering with other content providers as well, including Rdio, MOG, Rhapsody and others.
“You’ll now start seeing new music posts and play buttons all over your newsfeeds,” Spotify explains on their blog. “Hit a play button and the music starts. Right there.”
Last but not least, the recent controversy with Netflix didn’t keep that company’s CEO, Reed Hastings, from popping in at the close of the F8 keynote to say hello and comment on how his company (as well as Hulu Plus) will soon be able to stream video content to the new Timeline feature — but oddly, not quite yet in the United States.
That’s right — Netflixers in Canada and Latin America will actually get first crack at enjoying their content in Facebook before we colonials do, apparently due to some kind of bizarre privacy law currently due for revision in Congress, according to This Is My Next. Weird, right? Of course, you’ll need the new Timeline in order to get that integration anyway, so keep your eyes peeled for those changes.
Follow this article’s author, J.R. Bookwalter on Twitter
(Images courtesy of Facebook and BGR)
Skype for Mac 5.4 Beta is now available, and it brings full Facebook integration right into your Skype account. With the new version, you can connect to Facebook, then instant message, import your newsfeed, comment and “Like”all from within Skype.
You can download Skype for Mac 5.4 Beta for free. Installing it is easy and takes no time at all.
Once you have the new version running, there is a brief demo of the new features, and then you will be prompted to link to Facebook. You’ll have to authorize Skype to have access to a lot of your Facebook elements if you want to proceed.
Connecting to Facebook brings your newsfeed into Skype with a cool, multi-column layout. You can toggle between just your other Skype contacts or all of your Facebook friends. You can update your Facebook status, or comment or like a friend’s status, all from within Skype.
The new version also allows you to see your Facebook friends in your Skype contact list, see when they are online, and instant message them directly from Skype.
All of these features were previously available on Skype 5.5 for Windows, which was released on July 27. This is the first time Skype has brought Facebook to the Mac playground, however. According to the Skype Blog, Skype is “excited to finally deliver Facebook integration to our Mac users.” We are excited, too!
Adrian covers daily news as well as the weekly Law & Apple column for MacLife.com. You can follow him on Twitter, if you want to.
Facebook released a big update to their iOS app today, delivering several bug fixes, some enhanced features, and a few stylistic tweaks as well. But, before you ask, the answer is no; Facebook did not release an iPad version.
This update is pretty significant on its own, though. According to Facebook, it is now easier to control how your share through the app, as the update includes the ability to tag friends and places in posts, the ability to share external links from a web view, and improved privacy controls on posts that actually match your settings on the web site.
The improvements and bug fixes are much appreciated as well. With this update, Facebook claims to have improved Notifications speed, fixed a number of Chat bugs, made it easer to select filters in News Feed, fixed a number of Photos bugs, and, of course, improved performance and stability overall.
But what about the iPad you ask, again? Well, not today. In fact, this iPhone developer states that the update removes iPad support completely. Don’t despair, though; at least one site is floating the rumor that the long-awaited Facebook iPad app will be released on September 22. Which is about 18 months after the iPad was released, but who’s counting.
Via 9to5mac
Adrian covers daily news as well as the weekly Law & Apple column for MacLife.com. You can follow him on Twitter, if you want to.
