My new Facebook Timeline: the pros and cons

I’ve been playing around with the new Facebook this morning and I have mixed feelings about the changes. For those of you who want to wait until it gets rolled out, allow me to traumatize you right now by highlighting the major differences.

PHOTOS

Cover photo: The photo specs have changed so you’ll need to upload a high res, wide shot photo for your cover or else it will be pixilated.

Your tagged photos are way less prominent on the page. This could be a good thing!

Photos are only shown here, amongst your friends, check-ins and likes.

TIMELINE

FB is now organized into a timeline, dating all the way back to when you joined the social network and even allowing you to add content from the day you were born, which I don’t find necessary at all.

Pros of the timeline:

1) Highlight’s useful apps like music, film, tv, books, food and photography, making sharing your interests easier. You can now even consume media like TV and music directly in Facebook. So, if my buddy is listening to a new song and wants to tell everyone, he just has to interact with the song in a music app like Spotify and his friends will be able to see that and even listen to that song in real time with him.

2) Ability to go back into time and add or remove content easily. This is great if your network has turned more professional than personal in recent years and you easily want to hide stories of your torrid drunken college days.

3) Gives each profile a blog kind of feel and allows for more personalization

4) Cool new photo viewing function

5) Can easily hide stories that you don’t want to appear on your timeline and can unsubscribe to the updates of annoying people in your network.

Cons of the timeline:

1) Creepy! The new timeline is stalker heaven. With the click of a button, you can easily access status updates, photos, check-ins – the works – from years ago. Before, you needed to be seriously creepy to scroll back pages and pages to get this old content. Now, it’s quite easy to obtain.

No one needs to see these old photos and stories, not even me. What was up with my hair?

2) Because you can add content in the past, you can easily alter your timeline. “Yes officer, I was at a bar with these 3 friends that night. Look, it’s even on Facebook!”