Over the last week or so a post we wrote in September of this year has been getting a lot of traffic. The post, Return Your Facebook Timeline to Normal, was written shortly after Facebook unveiled the Featured Stories organization of our Facebook Newsfeeds.
That post was in response to that feature and allowed you to turn off Facebook’s determination of what your top stories should be from your friends. We called it the timeline because it came out at the same time Facebook was supposed to start the new profile timeline display but got held up due to some legal issues relating to the Timeline name.
In the past week Facebook has started to roll out their true timeline implementation which shows your Facebook profile happenings in a linear manner and it starts all the way back when you joined Facebook.
Facebook Profile Linear Timeline Sample
With this roll out users can visit https://www.facebook.com/about/timeline and learn all the details of this new profile layout and even opt to preview it applied to their timeline. When a Facebook user enters preview mode you will have 7 days to tweak your profile display before it goes public for your friends to see. The reason for this preview period is so a user can review their timeline and all the info in it and make decisions to possibly hide certain items from view.
The reason that feature is in the preview is because the new timeline displays every item you have ever entered into Facebook at anytime since you created your account. Apparently there are some folks who would prefer that some of those early entries stay buried like they are in the current profile display on Facebook.
The folks who are visiting our post are looking for a way to turn off the new profile timeline display and not necessarily change their Facebook Newsfeed appearance.
Well the news is not good for those who want to revert their profile to the old default display after trying out the new Timeline Preview. In reality this new linear timeline display is going to be the default profile display format for all Facebook profiles whether you try the preview or not. At some point Facebook is going to flip a switch and we will all have it without any going back.
So the answer is to take advantage of the profile preview and check out your linear profile and timeline to get it ready for primetime. If you have done that then you can either publish it or wait for the preview period to run out and then it will go live.
Now the Return Your Facebook Timeline to Normal post is still useful in that you can follow those instructions to have your newsfeed remain in order as opposed to letting Facebook decide what posts from your friends are the most popular.
Enjoy the new Facebook Profile formatting because it is here to stay.
