And now, two months after its announcement, it’s hitting the masses.

Latest Updates

While New Zealand is the first country to receive the Timeline rollout, Facebook has guaranteed a US launch is coming very soon. We’ve been playing around with our developer beta Timelines at thismoment since f8, and we couldn’t be more pumped for what the future holds.

Until Timeline, the social conversation was only current, focused on what people were saying and posting about your brand in the here and now. With this new change, we now have the opportunity to post and converse retroactively while also aggregating and summarizing users’ relationships with a brand in perpetuity.

Previously, Facebookers had to actively seek out old Wall content to interact with their friends’ pasts. Timeline however compels users to browse the history of their social graph and build a scrapbook of their lives.

Remember when you bought your first car that didn’t suck? How about when you camped out for two days to catch the midnight premiere of The Dark Knight? Or when your rapping on YouTube won a contest and got you that guest appearance in a high-profile music video?

These are the types of events that will be heavily featured in your Timeline history, and be a source of continuous audience engagement long after the memories have faded.

What this means for thismoment

We have big plans for the Timeline, and we’re building a suite of tools that will allow users to frictionlessly publish events from our Distributed Engagement Channel (DEC) to Facebook in order to generate a long-term, brand-relevant conversation.

UGC submissions, content views/ratings, conversations, and module interactions are among the numerous elements with the opportunity to be shot out to the Social Graph.

Because brands, as well as their fans, have different needs and behaviors, we’ll be doing a lot of work to help clients customize the frequency in which they publish content into their users’ Timelines.

Potential use-cases include:

·    Brands with heavily involved fans can utilize high-frequency publishing to foster a strong online community
·    Brands with fans who are sensitive to perceived Facebook privacy invasion can surface the most important interactions to prevent off-putting potential new fans; also
·    Brands can focus on scrapbooking old events into users’ histories.

(I for one would like to restart a conversation with my friends about how the hell we thought Pogs were so awesome in 1992 and maybe even throw in that one photo I found of me slamming my Alf Pog during a particularly heated match.)

Either way, we’ll be using these Timeline features for targeting new fans and advertising sponsored stories to spread your conversation virally several degrees beyond your immediate fan’s networks.

So to all you brands: thismoment is here to help you brainstorm on how to integrate with a new Facebook world that extends beyond mere Liking and puts all the focus on your brand’s authentic engagement with a user’s entire life. With good planning and a careful balance to not over-saturate users with brand-facilitated Timeline actions, this will be a huge win. And 2012 will be a huge year in the Social Graph for both users and brands alike! Roll up your sleeves, it’s time to get dirty!

- Jon Eccles
Facebook Technical Lead