As the Timelines roll out across Facebook (essentially phasing in Facebook 2.0) what should we understand about their impact?
Simply this: Timelines change everything. More than anything else that's changed everything ever has. And in ways you don't realize yet. The current implementation is powerful and beautiful and lovely, but it's a minor dent in the Universe. But Timelines 2.0 (of Facebook 3.0) will completely alter the way we use the internet. All of it.
Consider Zuckerberg's own metaphor: The Wall is the first fifteen minutes of a conversation with someone you've just met. The Timeline is the next three hours of that same conversation. It lets you tell the story of your life.
Now consider Timeline 2.0. If version one is the Story of You, version two is the Story of Us. Timelines 2.0 will draw on data across multiple users. It will be about aggregating content and assembling it in ways that let us see our lives differently. Where Timelines 1 is about curation, Timelines 2 will be about discovery and surprise. The focus will shift from curation to cultivation and filter criteria.
What you'll be hearing at the next F8: Serendipity. On Demand. On the fly. Tailored to your life.
Here are just a handful of use-case scenarios:
Today, I can look at my own history, generated over years of Facebook use. I can also visit a friend's timeline and see the same thing. Timeline 2 will let me say, "Show me the shared timeline between the two of us."
Show me the timeline that represents my college class. Now filter it down to my freshman dorm. Now add in my 2 best friends. Hey, that's a unique timeline that draws upon the public data from everyone who went to the University of Virginia at the same time I did. Very cool.
The Timeline meets the Venn Diagram.
And these Timelines will be special – they'll be unique and specific to the person requesting them and perfectly organized for that individual's needs. Search and query will be based on a topic-comment structure.
Show me the Timeline of Burning Man 2010, you might say. To build this timeline, Facebook will draw first upon your own content, then that of your friends, then that of their friends, then all the content related to the event that has been published publicly inside Facebook, then the content published publicly outside Facebook.
And it will be smart about prioritizing not just between these concentric rings (think ripples on a pond where your query is the pebble) but within them as well, using a deep understanding of the content gleaned from the way it has been liked and shared and tagged. The innermost rings are the most personal and intimate and they mean that the same query will yield different results for every user. That's huge.
This will change news and current events, impacting research and awareness even of things that aren't strictly social. It will change check-in and location based activities too. Timelines show you the past, but the past starts right now. It's a moment ago. So Timelines + check-ins can show you the story of a night club or restaurant or sporting event essentially in the present.
Gaming gets turned on its head, much for the better. The game companies that thrive will be the ones that use timelines to cultivate leagues and tell the story of a season with a playoff, even if it's Scrabble. Timelines that can be saved and shared become the instant replay and highlight reels that turn your game from an ephemeral distraction into watercolor talk.
These scenarios barely scratch the surface of what timelines, when they are assembled on demand and draw upon content from across the network can really do. But we're going to discover soon enough just how large a dent they'll make in the Universe. I'm guessing it's big.
This won't happen overnight, but the forces driving us toward this future are inexorable. We're all going to have to re-learn how we manage our content and publishing it publicly will be a kind of continuum, not a binary choice. But the inevitable uproar will be quelled when everyone realizes the tremendous value of this new level of sharing.
Of course, this is the end of the social network platform wars. Timelines 2.0 will make Google+ (the fastest growing social network in history) a never-ran product regardless of the resources Google devotes to it. Even if you move all your content to a new platform, you're missing out on the most important stuff unless you can get all your friends and all their friends to move with you.
Even search itself is threatened. There are lots of people trying to figure out what social search will look like. Well, to a large degree, this is it. There are so many interesting questions whose answer is a unique, tailored timeline and they are all beyond the reach of Google.
Of course, Google has an opportunity to start assembling its search results and presenting them in similar forms, and this would be very exciting to see. But it's a much harder problem to apply this idea to the entire web than to the well organized content of Facebook.
If you're wondering what this does to the start up landscape, expect to see lots of companies moving into the Timeline niche spaces. People focusing on things like improved tagging and the rich meta-data required to enable truly meaningful timelines. People creating timeline & search management tools for cultivating, saving and sharing custom timelines. People using custom timelines as a new form of editorial and publishing. People pivoting around timelines before the understand them and VCs demanding a timeline centric strategy for everything.
I've seen comments that the new Timeline makes Facebook 2011 look like Myspace 2005. But from my vantage point, it looks like the future.
