Lady Geek's Topic of The Day: The New Facebook Timeline

Tales of the The Lady Geek

Hello, your friendly neighborhood Lady Geek here with my second article. As you know, I’m kind of an eclectic geek and extremely undercover, the rarest Geek of them all, the elusive Sneak Geek! I’m here, in all my suited up glory, beautifully painted and coiffed with one mission. To tell you about the wonder of things I adore in this technological world.

At the 2011 F8 conference, Facebook announced that it would be releasing the next great thing in Social Media: Facebook Timeline.  What is Facebook Timeline? In the words of Mashable’s Pete Cashmore, “Timeline…is a way to illustrate your entire life -- not just the part you've been living on Facebook since you joined -- in a graphical way.”

What it Does:

“Timeline uses an algorithm to assess the most important moments of your life, which can then be edited to your satisfaction. Unwanted updates can be hidden from the Timeline. The new profile pages are thought to constitute one of Facebook's most extreme redesigns so far, completely reimagining what a social networking profile can be.”

Broken down, this means that Timeline is a sort of Social Mapping of major life events from birth to potentially forever; starting from the year you were born you can input baby pictures, major life events like your puppy’s funeral and the birth of the Olsen twins or even something more mundane like the day you got married along a real timeline. It’s customizable to your tastes, allowing you control over what people actually see among the posts you’ve made. You can use your own pictures to customize how it appears, and it has neat extras around. Say you took a picture of Fluffy, your pet Saber Tooth/Bloodhound mix. No more little bitty square somewhere along your wall, not for you ladies and gents. For you, we have a nice large picture easily tagged and shared, big enough for even Grandma Sally to make out all that tigery/puppy goodness! Sounds awesome, right? Trust me it looks even better than that!

Upon hearing about this new ‘upgrade’ a lot of my fellow Facebookers were mostly in an uproar, raging on their postings about the dreaded “Permanent Log Off”, complaining that we were all “just the little guys” that fuel the popularity and indeed, the need of this ultimate social network. It was a multinational virtual pity party where many of us, feeling powerless to fight “The Zuckerberg” screamed thusly:

“Not another feature I have to learn and get used to! KHAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNN!”

Not I. No dear readers, this lady geek quickly scanned all the posts and articles circulating about the new Facebook Timeline, finally hitting upon what I consider, the ultimate reward, that’s right, step by step instructions on how to be the first in my group to enable the thing.

Let me tell you, once I jumped that broom and entered the next generation of Social Media, I will never go back. Being forced to leave my lovely landing page to check out my network’s more common place Home page makes me leave a tiny bit of my soul behind each time.

All this gushing probably has you asking this very vital question: “Where in the world is my Facebook Timeline? Why am I so underprivileged as to be left out in the cold while this Lady Geek is having such a lovely time living the virtual high life? Am I the virtual 99%?”

So I am here to answer that today: And the answer is…Houston, we had a problem…and then we went to court and now we’re ready to rock and roll this puppy back to the Earth…starting with New Zealand.

What Happened:

Apparently, with the launch of Timeline originally planned to start in late September of this year, there was an issue about copywrite infringement from Timeline Inc. who said that Facebook stole their ideas and design a la early Microsoft.  They’ve been back and forth to court ever since and from what I’m seeing Facebook won. They must have because on Tuesday, December 6, 2011 New Zealand was the first country to experience it without having to manually migrate to their wall.  According to CNN, Facebook Timeline will be coming to a page near you sometime in the “near future”.

Of course, if you’re like me, you’ll want to make the move sooner than later.  Here are the steps to get the next great thing a bit earlier than most.

Step 1. Click here https://developers.facebook.com/apps

Step 2. Click allow

Step 3. Click "create new app" at the top of the screen

Step 4. In the top box, randomly put a word in. I used "catnip"

Step 4.5 In the bottom box randomly put a bunch of letters in until the side of the box flashes a green "available" then you type 'verify you're human code" and move to step 5. If you don't do it right a red "Failure" appears

Step 5. Click "Open Graph" on the left side

Step 6. You'll see the next screen, entitled "Get Started with Open Graph" -- fill in anything you want (it doesn't matter) (I used "eat" and "television") in those fields under the heading "start by defining one action than one object for your app." Click Get Started.

Step 7. On this screen, do nothing except scroll to the bottom and click "Save Changes and Next."
Do the same thing on the next screen.

Step 8. You'll be taken to the next screen. Wait a few minutes, and then go to your Facebook homepage. That's where you'll be invited to enable Timeline. Be patient at this point -- sometimes it requires you to wait before the changes take effect.

Step 9. When you get back to your home page, it'll invite you to timeline at the top of your screen, click 'get it now' and then it's all gravy baby!! Enjoy!!


Written by Maryann Paris