We know Facebook is testing a new personal profile Timeline with more of a single column look.
This design appears to be somewhat of a hybrid between the old “tabbed” profile format and the new “timeline’ format.
More details about this new Timeline design continue to surface.
The new format lists all content posts in one column on the left side of the profile while the right side contains only friends and recent activity.
This presents all content posts such as photos, links, and status updates as a single left-side stream in a hierarchical format with the most recent content at the top.
Some Throwback Elements
The biggest change is a throwback to the old Facebook profiles with the reintroduction of tabs across the top of the timeline rather than the app boxes. This also includes the addition of a “Collections Manager”- a feature that allows you to edit and customize the content tabs at the top of your timeline as well as rearrange the content in the right-hand column (Friend box, recent activity box, etc.).
Previously, you could only hide these items rather than rearrange them. Older Facebook profiles allowed you the ability to rearrange boxes of content. Screenshots of the new profile layout show room for five tabs to be visible at once and this includes a “more” tab for accessing a dropdown menu for all apps not shown (music, movies, Foursquare check-ins, etc.).
Here are a few screenshots (HT InsideFacebook and Mashable) of the Collections Manager, a side-by-side of a single column profile next to the regular timeline profile, and the dropdown “more” tab in action.
Why this is important
While there is no timeline for this change, you can safely assume that in the not-too-distant future this feature will be rolled out for pages since Facebook rarely gives features to user profiles but not brand pages.
This means thinking about how content appears on your page. The single column timeline makes content easier to follow due to a single line of tracking. This could be manipulated visually with photo posts to leverage your timeline as one large image broken apart rather than individual ones.
A key change is that content aggregations (i.e. how often a user interacted with a graph app like Spotify or Instagram) are now segregated from the timeline.
On the surface, this would appear to be a hit to developers, but I think this is being done to make app engagement more natural for the user and build trust overall in app engagement. Rather than looking at Liz’s profile to view the timeline box featuring the last five movies she watched using GetGlue or Flixster, I can now find that information by exploring her profile under a more natural tab of “Movies.”
Additional clicks yes, but similar to when Facebook changed app permission notifications, the extra step builds trust in interacting with the app and could lead to more usage long term. Facebook has rolled out a number of app-focused updates lately that make for a better user experience and more natural story publishing.
They also recently allowed flexible sentences on graph apps so that “Paul tracked Muse on Songkick” (i.e. “What the heck is tracking?”) can now appear as “Paul tracked Muse to get concert updates via Songkick” (i.e. “Ohhhh I want to try that app!”). Facebook ultimately wants your interaction with life and things on the web to appear as seamlessly on a Facebook newsfeed as it would if you sat down with someone to tell them the clothes you bought this past weekend.
There are probably a lot of folks foaming at the mouth over the possibility that default landing pages and tabs are going to make a comeback on brand pages.
There’s no confirmation yet on whether or not this is something that Facebook will roll out, and if they did it would mean in the last year they’ve had a feature, taken it away, and added it back. It’s not only very “un-Facebook” but it also shows how unreliable it can be to rely on page structure in a marketing plan.
The biggest takeaways from Facebook here are still the same: good content does well and Facebook emphasizes user experience over everything else.