A radical change in Facebook’s profile was supposed to hit all users of the social networking site last September, but somehow it didn’t materialize. The date was moved to October, but the month went with all users doing things the usual way. As December approached there was no clear sign as to when Timeline, the new profile, would finally be launched for all the 800 million Facebook members worldwide. Some said it could be in January 2012, but the surprising announcement from Facebook is that Timeline has actually been rolled out in New Zealand in December and can now be used by users worldwide who want to try it.
Facebook Covers and Profile Timeline were the talk of the town in the weeks leading up to September and more than a million users were already actually testing the new way of doing things. However, a problem surfaced when a relatively small Chicago company called Timelines.com brought to court its complaint against the use of the name. While there’s no official announcement from Facebook that this has been the cause of the delay in the full launching of Timeline, some observers believe that this is really the reason. The court hearing for the trademark complaint, originally set for December, was moved to January. In the meantime, however, it looks like all these date changes would likely appear in the Facebook history timeline of Facebook itself!
Interestingly, while people were waiting for the court to clear the matter, there’s a group of observers who say that the reason for the Facebook Timeline delay could be the negative feedback from its early users who tried out the new profile page and its features on a beta test. The new design was likable. But many found scanning the recent updates on one’s profile a difficulty, and this is the first thing most users do, which is easy in the current profile that does it chronologically. In Timeline the status updates are divided by a navigation bar and the updates are scrambled such that the most recent entry is not easily found. This and a few other unsatisfactory experiences should really be addressed by Facebook to satisfy the users.
The entries on Facebook history timeline would definitely show the several changes that the social networking site underwent from its beginning to the present. So, will Facebook users worldwide really like Timeline?