#f8 The New Facebook Experience: Timeline, Ticker & Gestures

F8 is the annual conference that Facebook hosts each year for its team, entrepreneurs, developers, app creators, and all sort of cool geeks. Needless to say, I wish I was there! Here are some of the newest things that are coming to the Facebook experience including the new Timeline, Ticker, and Gesture buttons.

Facebook Timeline

Facebook users spend an insane amount of time creating content for their profiles. This comes across as making sure the photo you take is perfect as your next Facebook Profile Pic or the Note you share has your innermost Gratitude moments. This new Timeline allows users to express who they truly are and share their lives in any way they want. You spend years curating the stories of your life. Imagine expressing the story of your life and having those key moments highlighted and called out on your profile. The Timeline is the heart of your Facebook experience. This new way of scrapbooking your life happens through adding pictures from when you were born, to your high school graduation, to your wedding day, and the birth of your children or even your children’s children. It will be chronological in the Timeline and allows you to jump to a specific year or even just yesterday. You will be proud to call make your Timeline your home, even your identity. Here is a sample of what this new Timeline looks like: https://www.facebook.com/about/timeline

The Cover Photo is a nice big photo that shows a unique moment in your life or an image that completely moves you. You still have your profile pic, but now there will be a huge Cover Photo that you can change with a click of the button that expresses who you are. The Timeline is fully customizable as to what you share, who sees it, and how it is laid out.

There is also a Report feature on the Timeline. Imagine if you are using one of the cooking apps that shows everything you have cooked in the last month. Instead of having to go to each post to remember what you made, you can go to the Report and see all the recipes you’ve tried and rate your favorites. Seeing a summary of everything you have done can be more powerful and express your true authentic self on your timeline. Think about what you want on your Timeline, and build it. It’s really quite easy.

Sign up to be one of the first users to have this new Timeline: http://www.facebook.com/about/timeline

Gesture Buttons

When Facebook launched the Like button it exploded across the web. In took less than a month for the Like button to appear on over 100,000 websites! One of the reasons Facebook went away with the term Fan on a Fan Page was that younger people didn’t want to say they endorsed a certain product. Well, it seems they feel the same way about the Like button. Personally, I would preferred the term Fan over Like for business pages. Facebook is now rolling out Gesture Buttons that people can click that shows they have “Listened” to a song or “Watched” a video, or “Read” a book, even “Ate” at a specific restaurant rather than simply Liking it.

At Facebook’s #f8 conference, the company has given developers the power to create their own actions too! These Gesture actions are the next step in integrating Facebook with every part of the web. What would you say on a button if you had the opportunity to create one? I might make one that said Smile or Wine Time, but that’s just me!

Ticker Time

A lot of people don’t like the new Ticker on the right hand side of the screen. I’ve had it for a few weeks and have grown to really like it. To me, it is very similar to Twitter and is a very easy concept for me to grasp and love. Now, instead of having my feed filled when someone becomes Friends  with someone else or when they Like a page, all of this lightweight stream stuff is moved over to the Ticker. That’s right, you will no longer see this kind of minutia in your News Feed. Only posts, pictures, or links will be shared on the News Feed. Thank goodness!! So all of you you disabled the Ticker Stream yesterday, might want to rethink that, and here is the main reason why.

When listening to music on Spotify it shows up on your Ticker stream. You can hover over it and click it, then you will be streaming and listening to the same music as your friend – even if it’s halfway through the song. Hulu has an app where you can watch the same shows as your friends too. This is some really powerful new applications and makes the Ticker Stream a vital part of your Facebook Experience.

Share on Facebook