My New Facebook Timeline - 10 Points If You Can Find Drunk Photos I'm Tagged In
Facebook’s “Timeline” display became available for all users this week. It’s the new way Facebook is allowing you to show off your profile all the way back until the beginning of time.
I’m sure it’s been years since you were tagged in a drunken photo, complained about your job or boss by name, or dropped 3 F-bombs per post, but now it’s all easily accessible to anyone who can view your profile. That includes your current and future employers…And YES you can get fired (or not hired) for what you post on Facebook.
You can activate your Timeline manually now, but it will become standard for everyone eventually. So how do you prepare? Here are 4 things to help you get your timeline ready:
1. As always you should review your Privacy Settings. Facebook changes them often. Go ahead and delete any Apps you don’t use anymore (I couldn’t believe how many I had!).
2. Clean up your Timeline. You have 7 days after you activate it to make it look the way you want before anyone else can see it. That gives you a chance to put up a Cover Photo (more on that in #4) and clean up anything in your history you don’t want others to see.
3. Get ready to have it suck up a lot of your time. When you look at how empty your Timeline and/or Life looks before you started on Facebook you might be tempted to fill it with major life events, photos, and videos. I’ve been married the whole time I’ve been on Facebook so I thought it would be funny to go back and add ex-girflriends to my timeline so I could have it show things like “in a relationship” and “it’s complicated.”
4. You can do something fun with your Cover Photo. It’s the new picture across the top of your profile. Take a second to make it something that reflects who you are since it’s what people will see when they visit your page. It could be your family, a hobby, or anything that’s important to you. As you can see above I ended up using a photo of me golfing. I enjoy golf, and I loved the depth that came with the picture – Plus I figured we could all use a little more green since it’s winter. Here are some fun ideas if you want to put some work into it.
It’s pretty fun clicking back through your own Timeline, although if you’re like me you’ll realize how dull your posts were when you first started on Facebook: ”Hey thanks for the poke!”
December 16th, 2011 at 8:35 pm
Where does this say how your timeline can get you fired?
December 16th, 2011 at 8:38 pm
The idea was that all of your past posts (drunken photos, expletives, etc.) will now be visible to people who visit your page. I’ll update the article so that’s clear. Thanks for the feedback!