Facebook changes: Timeline, Social News, Music, Movies, and new verbs

Facebook isn't being shy about rolling out its Timeline interface to as many of the corners of its site as it can. In addition to the rumored addition of the Timeline to Brand Pages, the social network is also adding Timeline features to Facebook Groups. The most obvious change is the new full-width top image, though if the administrator doesn't set a lead image it defaults to a collage of the profile images from group members. There are also clearer sections for group topics, links, members, and events. The new topic prompts, "What should people post in this group?" is apparently designed to make it less likely that groups will be filled up with the kind of chatter than can result in annoying notifications.

The features are available now to all users.

Facebook has today announced that thirteen new media partners have joined its Open Graph timeline apps program. The Daily Show, Huffington Post, MSNBC, and CBS Local (New York and Los Angeles) are some of the latest big-name partners to sign up. Open Graph apps are "social adverts" that automatically post a user's activity into a box on their profile page, and to a ticker on their friend's news feed. Some of the new apps allow you to view content directly on Facebook, whereas others connect into the relevant website. In addition to the current sharing features, Facebook recently detailed a new API that will allow advertisers to feature Open Graph activities alongside links and other relevant materials within users' news feeds.

Before Open Graph, if you viewed an article on, for example, The Guardian website, you had to either manually share the link or click "Like" for your friends to know about it. Now, everything you read will automatically appear on your profile, unless you explicitly ask the app not to share a particular article. According to TechCrunch, certain apps, such as NewsCorps's The Daily, don't allow you to curate what appears on your Facebook profile, leaving you with the decision to either share everything, or not use the Open Graph app at all. A full list of the additional Open Graph apps follows:

Brand pages for social networks seem to be the new hip way for companies to promote themselves on the web, but Facebook's Timeline upgrade for regular user profiles has left its Pages looking comparatively dull. It looks like the balance could be restored soon enough, though, with Timeline apparently set to roll out to brand-focused Pages in the near future. AdAge is reporting that the update will likely be unveiled on February 29th at fMC, Facebook's marketing-focused conference. At first it should be limited to beta access for a few partners, but we should be seeing it roll out for all other brand pages later. It would seem to make sense for Pages in other categories to receive the update as well, though there's no word on that yet. Twitter's recent brand pages update seemed to have been inspired by the Timeline feature, so it's only natural that Facebook would make the same connection. We're not sure how all this will look, but at least this should make it easier for companies to choose their banner image.

Facebook's developer site mentions this action targeting specifically in certain advertising APIs, so although this is a limited trial, it seems likely that they're preparing to push these services, or a variant of them, to the masses at some point soon. This latest progression of Facebook's push for social marketing further blurs the lines between ads and social sharing. In other words, for marketers, it's probably a dream come true.

Facebook is testing a new photo-viewing interface with a small number of users, and it bears certain… similarities to a competitor's design. That competitor would be Google+, which uses a near-identical combination of black frame, large picture on the left, and comment stream on the right. See for yourself — above is the new Facebook interface, and below is a shot from Google+. Unoriginal it may be, but we think being able to view comments and the picture at the same time is a big improvement in this brave new world of widescreen monitors.

It's not the first time Facebook has been accused of lifting from its new rival, with its revamped Lists feature being pretty similar to Google+'s Circles (which in turn was pretty similar to Facebook's Groups). Maybe the next step is for Google+ to develop a Timeline-style profile banner — hey, Twitter just did it.

The preparation period is over and there's no going back. Facebook just announced Timeline will be a mandatory change for everyone in "the next few weeks." In a terse blog post update, Facebook says "everyone will get timeline. When you get timeline, you'll have 7 days to preview what's there now." In case you haven't been following Facebook's Timeline news, once it's activated, you have seven days to tweak your new profile, change settings, and adjust images before it's visible to other users. Get started at Facebook's Timeline page — we recommend setting aside a few hours to get everything in order — and here's our guide on how to start preparing your profile now.

Tonight Facebook is finally taking the wraps off of Open Graph, launching with 60 new partners ranging from smaller sites like Airbnb, Foodly, and Pinterest to big names like Ticketmaster and Rotten Tomatoes. Carl Sjogreen, Facebook's Director of Platform Product, debuted the new Open Graph partners and larger launch tonight, though it was initially shown off at last year's f8 conference. Oddly, Zuckerberg was nowhere in sight at this evening's brief launch.

The Open Graph initiative is a way to take data from other social networks and apps, and pull it into the Facebook ecosystem. For example, the music you're listening to on Spotify or running distances you track on MapMyRun will be pulled into Facebook. Now, your cooking, eating, traveling, and running won't be siloed in your separate social networks; all your digital data can come streaming into Facebook.

Whether you're ready or not, Facebook has begun the Timeline rollout, and your lowly, simple profile page will soon be transformed into a glorious two-column scrapbook documenting every facet of your digital life. It's the most radical change in the history of the site, so unless you opt to shut down your account, we recommend going into this with the knowledge of what to expect and how to deal with it, whether or not you agree with Zuckerberg that a life-spanning scrapbook best represents humans in the digital age.

Several days after initially appearing on Android and mobile, Facebook Timeline is now available for iOS via the 4.1 update. It also adds access to your Facebook Lists and subscriptions, neither of which were available in the major 4.0 update from earlier this fall. To see your Timeline after updating from the App Store, tap the navigation button in the top left and select your profile — you'll find your Lists accessible farther down the sidebar. Assuming you've enabled Timeline, it should show up in a single-column view that lets you scroll through your personal biography as filtered through Facebook. The new Timeline features are only available on the iPhone and iPod; Facebook notes that iPad support is "coming soon."

Thanks, PlanetXbox360

Just a few hours after launching the new Timeline profile design globally, Facebook is debuting the new feature on Android and m.facebook.com. The smaller screen keeps the mobile timeline constrained to a single column instead of the web version's dual column setup, but you'll find a lot that's similar here. Now, when clicking through to a friend, you can scroll through their history (or your own) by days, weeks, months, and years. Images feature much more prominently in the new Android app, and swiping left or right moves you through maps, photos, subscribers and more. While Timeline is coming to iOS soon, according to Facebook, there's no word on a release date. For now, iOS users will have to use the mobile website.

The big change to the way Facebook presents its user profiles and data is rolling out globally today. Timeline, the name and central theme of the visual overhaul, launched in New Zealand first about a week ago, and now Facebook's delivering it to the rest of the world as well. Cognizant of the potential for user revolt, Facebook is also giving everyone a seven-day review period, wherein you'll get to see exactly how your Timeline looks and what information it includes before any of your friends can cast an eye over it. You'll be able to promote some activities and events to feature more prominently or completely hide the ones that you'd rather people didn't know about.

To activate Timeline today, go to Facebook's Timeline demo site and click the "Get Timeline" button.

While we're sure more than a few of you have already got the Timeline through posing as a developer, for everyone else the rollout begins today. The Timeline is Facebook's "new way of expressing who you are," which blurs the current dividing lines in your profile and mixes the content from your information section (including your Likes and music taste) with the links and statuses posted onto your wall. It also makes older stories far more accessible, meaning that people can skip back a couple of years and see the photos of you as a drunken mess in college. New Zealand's set to be the first to receive the public rollout, with Facebook saying that this limited test bed will be used to optimize the new design's speed and performance. However, we've seen reports already of users in other countries receiving the invitation to adopt the new profile style, so it seems that a wider release might be coming sooner than expected. We're already bracing ourselves for the wave of complaining statuses, but while you're waiting, check out our tour of the new design.

Facebook's redesign at the end of September was accompanied by a major, and not universally loved, change: sharing of things you listen to with Facebook-connected apps now happens automatically instead of only when you choose it. The negative user feedback has led Spotify to offer a private listening option, but overall, the impact for the music services that chose to sign on with Facebook has been phenomenally positive. Mog, a US-only free music subscription service, has been among those beneficiaries, with its traffic numbers going from 40,000 active users at the beginning of October to north of 160,000 at the month's end. Company CEO David Hyman keeps it short and sweet in describing Facebook as "the best distribution platform [Mog] have ever had." Of course, as pointed out by All Things D, in spite of this rapid growth, Mog and Rdio and the current leader in terms of users, Spotify, still have a challenge on their hands in converting these non-paying users into loyal purchasers of their paid services. Somebody's got to pay for all that free music, after all.

Just a few days ago, Facebook announced a number of significant changes, the most important of which is the morphing of personal profiles into "timelines," where each update, tagging, event, and photo is now a "story" of one’s life. The social network will now serve for each person who uses it as a chronological catalogue of events on a line, leading inevitably to death. This is the feature which has gotten the most attention, and I have much to say about it — such as the fact that I find it truly odd to encourage what I can only describe as "instantaneous" nostalgia about events which have just happened. But, in truth, Facebook has long been heading toward this use, and though I don’t really see the attraction personally, I understand that the need to document one’s life in detail has always been an alluring prospect for the human race. The fact that the Timeline is a dumbed down version of scrapbooking — usually the domain of retired people — is also odd to me, but I won't pretend I don't understand the draw.

The feature that I find most unsettling, however, is the connection which Facebook now has to applications such as Rdio, a streaming music service which already served as a type of social network: you can have friends and followers, and share your listening habits in a closed off network. Rdio is a tiny service compared to Facebook, but was already connected with it, and had the ability to share a song with the click of a button whenever you wished.

Just as we heard last night, Facebook has just announced its Music service where it is teaming up with MOG, Spotify, Rdio, Rhapsody, and many other partners.

Obviously, this is a big social push for Facebook and its partners. Once you authorize the appropriate music service, you’ll be able to click a friend’s song activity in the Facebook ticker, which then takes you to the song in that app or website. So, for example, if you click on a friend’s Spotify activity, that song will load immediately in the Spotify desktop app, and the new "Listen with a friend" feature lets you along at the same point in the song as your friend. Additionally, you can check out a user’s individual music timeline in order to look at their top plays, playlists, and recent listens.