Way back in September -- a simpler time, when The Lion King (3D) was the number-one movie, and Rick Perry was the GOP frontrunner for president -- Facebook announced that it was overhauling the look of its profile. Mark Zuckerberg, at a huge event for Facebook developers, introduced the world to the radical new Timeline profile, a reverse-chronological and visual look back at your entire life, from the present day at the top of your stream, down to your birth at the bottom. The social network said that this timeline profile would start rolling "in a few weeks," but for whatever reason, Facebook profiles remained the same.
That is, until now.
The new Facebook timeline profile is coming, and New Zealanders will be the first to (officially) try it out.
In a brief update to the September blog post that announced the timeline in the first place, Facebook's Samuel Lessin writes that the timeline is becoming available to New Zealand Facebook users starting immediately.
We announced Timeline in September and made it available to developers building apps on our platform. Since then, over a million people have signed up for the developer beta to access Timeline. The feedback we've received so far has been invaluable. Starting today, we are making Timeline more widely available as we measure speed and other types of performance. We'll begin by making it available to people in New Zealand and then roll it out more broadly in the near future.
Again, it appears that there's no timeline (ha!) for the new profile to be released in America, even though we've been waiting for two months now. Facebook remains tangled in a lawsuit with timelines.com over the uniqueness of the new design, which seemed to be the reason for the delay. But that hasn't stopped over a million people from signing up (or posing as) app developers and trying out the new profile for themselves, nor is it stopping Facebook from beginning its rollout in New Zealand.
The facelift to the profile is the final change in a series of cosmetic revisions to Facebook. The Facebook home page has been almost completely transformed, with an ever-scrolling News Ticker in the upper right hand corner and a persistent chat window below. The News Feed, too, received a major update, with stories sorted by importance rather than newness.
Now it appears -- starting with New Zealand -- the Facebook profile will have its transformational moment, too. As a refresher, the new profile comes with major design changes and new features, like a cover photo that spans the length of the top of your profile and a totally new, almost-checkerboard style layout for the content that has been posted on your profile.
Below, read up on Facebook's new timeline profile as you brace yourself for its eventual landing here in the United States.
