The Real Problem with Facebook's Timeline

http://remarkedly.com/2012/01/29/the-real-problem-with-facebooks-timeline/

by krausejj • 14 years ago

99 54 14 years ago

remarkedly.com

purephase• 14 years ago

Honestly, if anyone has an issue with any of these points, why are they using Facebook in the first place?

csallen2• 14 years ago

For the same reason you wouldn't leave your home country just because you take issue with a few things.

Any complex system is going to have good parts and bad parts. Walking away because you don't like the bad would require you to abandon the good. An often more efficient alternative is to stay, continue to enjoy the good, and campaign to have the bad changed or removed.

randonymous• 14 years ago

One is a participatory republic - where we can change the rules if we ask for it. And the rules are set by society to benefit - presumably - itself.

One is a corporation whose purpose is to extract value in any means possible - even were it to the detriment of society and its members.

jjacobson• 14 years ago

Facebook should add a new privacy filter "Hide from anyone in my LinkedIn Network" to solve this problem

dtsingletary• 14 years ago

Sounds like a job for an outside developer using their API...

avolcano• 14 years ago

Obvious, real world example: I've been dreading Timeline because I know the only high-resolution pictures of me on Facebook (that I've either uploaded myself or been tagged in) all include my ex-girlfriend, so I'll need to take a different picture for the header image.

I know how absurd that may sound, but Timeline, especially taken long-scale, could have a major impact on how we perceive our lives and ourselves because of how impossible it will be to escape from the past without painstakingly filtering and removing posts and pictures.

The obvious response, of course: "if you don't want permanence, don't upload in the first place." And this will be something I keep in mind, unless Facebook adds features to easily prune content from Timeline. But it's ridiculous that I should need to be that concerned about every pithy status I decide to post, not because of its contents in the present, but how they could be perceived in the future by myself and others.

samstave2• 14 years ago

It would be pretty awesome for FB to have a "Selective Memory" feature... where you can apply filters to the timeline such as "pictures minus those with [ex-girlfriend] tagged in them" "pictures where place does not equal [bar/club]"

etc...

orijing• 14 years ago

That would be a great app--Facebook content management utility. Write a few queries, like the UI equivalent of

  UPDATE posts SET visibility = CLOSE_FRIENDS WHERE ts < NOW() - 3600 * 24 * 365

  DELETE FROM posts p WHERE COUNT(SELECT id FROM tags t WHERE t.post_id = p.post_id AND t.user_id = EX_GIRLFRIEND_ID)=1

krausejj2• 14 years ago

the part about "don't upload in the first place" is interesting - i wonder if quality/quantity of sharing on facebook changes because people will (consciously or subconsciously) be thinking about the Timeline and how this post will fit in their "lifestream"

jahmed2• 14 years ago

Maybe we should be concerned with the perceptions of the future. The younger generation is already accepting the idea of unforgettability and I think this could push us to accepting the idea that our past acts, thoughts, and words have relevance to the future.

tripzilch• 14 years ago

> The younger generation is already accepting the idea of unforgettability

Really? I work with kids and that's not really my experience. One of them told me what one of their friends posted on Twitter, which I won't repeat here, but shows that they really, really have no idea.

jquery• 14 years ago

I think the obvious solution is for Facebook to offer temporal privacy settings, e.g., "Hide all content older than X months/years."

krausejj2• 14 years ago

agreed - i am shocked they aren't doing this. i understand that they want people to give it a try, but forcing users to either divulge all their information instantly or spend hours deleting manually - this is just hubris on the part of facebook. i hope they can get that ipo through before people start deactivating.

pault• 14 years ago

I quit facebook because of this. When the timeline preview came out I was horrified at all the stupid shit I had posted years ago when I first signed up and only my close friends were on it. Of course all of that stuff was there before, but you would have had to click through hundreds of pages on my wall before you could find it. With the timeline all it takes is a few scrolls. With the lack of a bulk remove feature, I decided it was easier just to delete my account. There are so many things I already disliked about Facebook, the timeline was just the final straw.

kajecounterhack• 14 years ago

There does happen to be a "hide old posts" option, fwiw. It might have been implemented after you left.

dangrossman• 14 years ago

As far as deleting your past, my sister does it all the time. I haven't asked her how, but every couple weeks she wipes out her entire wall without anything else changing. There must be tools for it.

RandallBrown• 14 years ago

If you don't want your past on the timeline, remove it. It's that simple. This isn't adding any new functionality to Facebook, it's just presenting it differently.

Personally, I love how easy the timeline makes it to jump back to my freshman year of college. I can see how much I've changed as a person for better or worse. It's like an excellent scrapbook of my life and I'm happy to have it.

henrikschroder2• 14 years ago

Are there any tools for doing that in bulk? It will take me ages to remove all my posts for a single year in the past if I'm to delete them one by one.

JeremyBanks• 14 years ago

"remove it. It's that simple."

FTFA: "And if you have been even partially active on Facebook for the past few years, there is simply way too much of it to possibly delete manually. There is no button to simply “delete all” (trust me, I’ve looked)."

kmfrk• 14 years ago

Tell me about it. I had to spend the better part of a day anonymizing my Quora profile, because their concept of private profiles seems like something the founders brought over from their stint at Facebook. Even so, it seems like there is still some history in my EDITS tab that I have no idea how to hide or purge.

Back when I decided to do over my Twitter profile, I used the API to automate the deletion of all my tweets. Any other way would be impossible.

estel• 14 years ago

Yes, it's still as hard as before to remove content.

But I don't see how "improving content discoverability" is suddenly a bad thing on Facebook? Yes, Timeline makes it easier to find old stuff, but on HN aren't we always looking for users to be able to access and discover content as easily as possible?

natesm• 14 years ago

This would actually be pretty easy to do (for someone on Hacker News).

You could do it with the real API, but it could also probably be done with a few lines of Javascript pasted into the URL bar on your profile.

Any takers?

rane• 14 years ago

It is not simple at all, and in fact, I noticed that posts I had deleted came back when I enabled Timeline.

kickingvegas• 14 years ago

Related to this topic, be on the lookout for the episode "The Entire History of You" from "Black Mirror".

henrikschroder2• 14 years ago

What I would love to see on Facebook is a way for me to make all non-starred posts older than X private. That way I can post lots of stuff and have the recent timeline filled with all sorts of crap which gives an impression of me, now, but it also allows me to hide all the old and only bring out the highlights, the things I actively want to be visible.

The problem is that the things I want to be visible changes with time, so I can't just not post it in the first place, because what seems perfectly fine today may be really bad a few years from now, and I can't know that ahead of time. And there really is no way to delete everything as far as I know.

trouble• 14 years ago

I would like something similar as well. Perhaps some way for friends to only view my history back to the date where I added them as a friend, that way my oldest and closest friends have access to all of our history together and my newest, less familiar friends only have access to the me they've only ever known.

doomlaser• 14 years ago

The author fails to see that people exist in a reality where stuff like the Facebook Timeline is just another fact of life, and the facebook profile is just a useful component of getting to know someone. That is, I would imagine that most people are familiar enough with the mechanics of social networks to be capable of seeing beyond random old posts on Facebook when learning about a person.

nitrogen• 14 years ago

Most people probably are, but most employers, lenders, governments, etc. (and malicious ex-SOs) can and do use any information they can get. Even if "it will never happen to me," guarding against the exceptional case of abuse is worth the effort.

eurleif• 14 years ago

The old information was always there. It's just easier to get to now. The lesson here is that one shouldn't rely on security through obscurity.

rylz• 14 years ago

Exactly. I actually think that Timeline is an improvement for user privacy, as it makes it easier for users to see exactly what information about them is accessible, and they can then decide if they want to remove it or strengthen privacy controls.

In the past, that ex-girlfriend or boss might have taken the time and effort to dig through content to find out about a drunken college night, but you would probably have completely forgotten it existed. Timeline offers you a way to double check old content comparatively quickly and easily.

ithought• 14 years ago

My only interest in Facebook is keeping in touch with old friends and having a way to remind either myself or others to reach out and say hello.

If it wasn't for e-mails (gmail), I would had never re-connected with some people on Facebook. The interface is an ice breaker and a way to less awkwardly contact someone you haven't spoken to in years. Or quickly see how someone is doing.

Most of what I want is simple and fundamental. It doesn't require me giving a never-ending marketing survey on my interests. My desired service is connectivity with a simple interface that can largely exist off my e-mail contacts. I don't see why a $75 billion company is needed to do this.

nirvana• 14 years ago

Just had my first look at the Timeline. As part of my "I'm leaving Facebook" project, I've been manually deleting every single submission I've made on Facebook, going back about 5 years. When I finally delete my account, there will be nothing left. This has taken awhile, because it is such a pain that I can only do a short period of time at a time.

However, Timeline actually makes this a lot easier. I can click on 2008 and then see everything in 2008 and delete it all right from the timeline.

The reason I'm deleting it all is because Facebook asks for confirmation of "Delete this post?" for every single one. If I say yes, and they remove it from view, I have, as far as I'm concerned, both a moral and legal right to believe it is actually deleted from their database. Otherwise "delete this post?" would be a fraudulent offer.

Thus, if any information that I've deleted shows up in the future, I will have a claim against them. (Whether its practical to press that claim or not, I don't know. I just want them to be obligated to have deleted it because their software made the promise that they were.)

samstave2• 14 years ago

I would suggest you followup with a request to facebook for whatever information they have on you, once you feel you've completed your deletion.

As someone who has never had a facebook account, though just about 99% of the people I know do, I am interested to see what this "shadow profile" of me looks like.

My wife and others have logged into FB from my machine, phone and ipad previously - thus I am sure that there were periods of time where my actions were tracked based on the install of their cookies.

I'd wonder what the legal basis would be of FB tracking those without accounts, based on the cookies of others.

junto2• 14 years ago

They will "Facebook delete" it. In other words "hide it" from you and pass it on to the NSA through their priority firehouse feed. ;-)

jedberg• 14 years ago

Their ters of service make it very clear that they don't delete things when you choose to delete it. I don't think you'd have much of a claim.

fl3tch• 14 years ago

I also manually deleted every piece of content that I could find before I deleted my account. The hardest part was finding comments that I had made on other people's posts, because often I would delete the mention of it on my own profile. However, Facebook has a facility to "see frienship", which will dig up these comments. So I actually visited every profile of several hundred people and went to the "see friendship" page, then deleted everything I could find, every comment, photo tag, etc. It took a few weeks to get to the point where I was satisfied that no trace of me existed on Facebook (at least nothing that could be accessed by users), and then I deleted my account.

Six months later, I still have no desire to go back.

michaelgrosner• 14 years ago

My problem with the Timeline is that I refuse to give Facebook any more information than they already have on my life. I can't stand when people talk about how they went back in time on their Timeline, grooming it with important life events and baby photos. Just another vector to sell us more stuff, I guess.

tylermenezes• 14 years ago

Facebook's Timeline is a bad choice mainly because it's impossible to find anything.

why-el• 14 years ago

Exactly. I have a close circle of friends who post interesting things and with the Timeline I just can't find anything.

akrymski• 14 years ago

yep, being able to jump to a date in the timeline is a good thing, but the weird collapsing and 2-pane layout is much too cumbersome. its actually a lot more usable on the iphone when you just have a single stream of posts.

junto2• 14 years ago

I went through all all posts manually and marked them with "only me" as custom privacy and "hide from timeline". What I now need is a tool that I can run on a monthly basis to automatically do this for any content older than a month.

I don't mind making inane posts on Facebook which friends can comment on as that post shows up in their newsfeed, but once enough time has passed for it to fall off the newsfeed then as far as I'm concerned it can be permanently deleted.

P.S. I've started referring to logical deletes as "Facebook deletes" in work.

tim_h• 14 years ago

Why is it that people will hold against you an immature act that you did years ago, ignoring the fact that people tend to mature as they age?

Perhaps the timeline will help overcome this tendency. By making everyone's history more visible, maybe people will become less sensitive to seeing past examples of immaturity and therefore weigh them less when making judgements about a person.

alagu• 14 years ago

Timeline is not annoying. Personal past is annoying. Timeline makes it easier to dig those stuffs out of the grave.

I love timeline. It is my life-log. I don't share everything publicly. I share it with Only Me/Close Friends/Family. All my old photologs are now migrated to facebook, with very limited Visibility.

Facebook photo management tools still suck. You could easily take a copy of your data from facebook (https://www.facebook.com/settings -> Download a copy of your data), but there is no easy way to delete them.

yogrish• 14 years ago

I too dont like FBs Timeline. Its total Mess. Many other Timelines don't get it either. Timekiwi to some extent is good. I have some ideas for a better timeline. If any hacker is willing to cowork, I can share my ideas to build the Best Timeline.

nekojima• 14 years ago

I dislike Timeline for three reasons.

- When some of my friends' Timelines open, it takes ages for it to load and then every other program I might have open on my laptop drags, if I leave that tab open - It is far more difficult to follow the "timeline" even for recent postings, that often you can miss interesting items - I can't hide or reduce to a select group, only delete postings

Which is why I haven't implemented and hate when I see it on other's profiles.

jinushaun• 14 years ago

No, people did not get used to the new News Feed. We just got tired of whining about it on a regular basis because Facebook will never change it back. Every one of my friends (across all demographics) still hate it very much.

yason• 14 years ago

I don't have Timeline yet, for some reason, but I don't think it's stupid because you get to be reminded of stuff you posted and wrote years ago. That's just you a few years ago. Part of living here is about not being the same person now as you were five years ago.

Why I think it's stupid is the damn layout. I used to be able to linearly scroll back to someone's recent history to check back what s/he said or posted. Now it's all sort of mixed up in a horrifically heavy layout that slows down tablets and less powered machines, and requires a large screen to be viewed properly.

movingahead• 14 years ago

I really don't get the premise of this post. If someone wanted to dig in to my life via my Facebook account, he or she could have done earlier also. It would have taken many more clicks though. Timeline is another way of presenting the data.

The problem is with Facebook's privacy controls and I think they have improved from the rock bottom that they had reached. Timeline will change our behavior on Facebook and that is something the News Feed also did. I don't see how that is necessarily bad.

waldr• 14 years ago

I think this is just changing the way the younger 'facebook' generation think, posting becomes less personal and more about how you like to be perceived. Those of us that grew up without facebook embraced it as a nice way to share personal items with our friends.

Now it seems more of a PR stream, people staging photos for facebook, carefully updating status's knowing that a wider audience can see.

For me timeline represents facebooks focus on a single identity that you control, rather than representing who you actually are.

The Real Problem with Facebook's Timeline

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