What is wrong with Facebook Timeline?

Facebook introduced a path breaking feature, called as the Facebook Timeline during its f8 Developers Conference on September 22, 2011 in San Francisco. Critics referred it as the best Facebook feature ever introduced.  Users started drooling over it while competing amongst them to upload the best cover photo; things were falling in place and destined to have a happy ending till the Timeline was available for general users in late December 2011. It sprang up a few surprises and as a saying goes “Even the Rose, the sweetest flower of all, has thorns on its stem“.

So what’s wrong with the Timeline?

Huge amount of information:

The Facebook Timeline arranges all your information in the form of a chronological table right from the time when you joined Facebook. It may sound exciting to have all the data from ‘stone-age’ back but all those ‘creepy’ little photos, posts and updates from your past, which you wanted to delete but couldn’t find are now available for full public view (don’t be surprised if you hear some gossip about you behind your back). Also, the Timeline throws open all your information out there and it can be a headache trying to manage this huge amount of data. Well, you pretty know what ‘manage’ means.

Data privacy:

If you think the Timeline carries the same privacy measures as till now, then you are wrong. The number of your friends, mutual friends, likes, dislikes and what not are readily available at just one click. This becomes a pain with the Facebook Privacy setting also being changed which means all users need to acquaint themselves all over again. You are again wrong if you think Facebook is a secure place for there are many creepy creatures standing around in black robes and a burning cigar, waiting for you to make that move and then run away with your precious confidential data. The recent spate of numerous SPAM attacks proves the same.

Facebook Games:

What’s common between FarmVille, CityVille and Mafia Wars? Well they all are hugely-popular addictive games played on Facebook. Recently, their players were spewing venom on Facebook authorities for introducing the Timeline which ended up disturbing their play scores and creating a mess. Some players were immediately dragged down to level 0 with null points; others couldn’t view their scores on the Timeline while for others, even after hours of playing, it just didn’t show any progress. No, this isn’t a problem that Zynga should deal with because it was all good with the old Facebook profile design; problems started after introducing the Timeline. Eww!

No going back:

If you have read the above points and have your Timeline activated, I join you as an unlucky fellow for there is no going back (The Timeline feature cannot be disabled [officially] ).

About the author

Nitin Agarwal

A blogger, tech evangelist, YouTube creator, books lover, traveler, thinker, and believer of minimalist lifestyle.

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