Now Facebook is making your profile into a more holistic timeline, or scrapbook, of your life. This will enable a new class of applications focused on helping people express themselves to emerge and revolutionize existing industries and experiences.
The founder of Causes goes into some good depth about what Facebook's new interface for one's profile means not only as an aesthetic change, but as better mechanism for allowing one's core passions and actions "rise to the top."
Before Timeline, the only way for you to help your friends understand something that was very important to you was to shout loud and often via status updates. People have done that and the "wall" has turned from Activity Display to Incomprehensible Graffiti. I have apps posting to my wall, me posting to my wall, others posting to my wall--it's a mess.
At the same time, one's Profile has never been very sexy to look at, and there's no reason to return to it, meaning that, again, the only thing to do to really see what I care about is cull through my activity stream.
Timeline solves both those problems (a messy Wall and a boring Profile) by helping users fuse the idea of actions and aspects. You are not only who you say you are (the old approach to "profiles") but also what you do (the old "wall" approach). Timeline allows users to fuse "you" by allowing you to express who you say you are via the actions that you do.
All this leads to a better platform for app developers. You see, because the Timeline is now focusing on user actions to determine "who they are," app developers now have a better place to allow their users to express themselves without fear of sharing actions becoming too spammy.
As the founder of Causes articulates in his post, those who really care about their causes now have a much better place to communicate their actions for that cause rather than the boring Profile or the noisy Wall.
All in all, I'm pretty excited about timeline, not only from a personal perspective but from a business/application development perspective.
