Kiss your Facebook profile goodbye... and say hello to Timelines

We're here at today’s Facebook f8 conference in San Francisco, where Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a major new feature: Timeline. It’s a sort of automated autobiography for the masses, a way for every single person to record and share the story of their lives. Where you've been, who you've been, what you've thought, all of it, laid out like one giant scrapbook.

"It’s the story of your life, with all of your stories, all of your apps and a completely new way to express yourself," said an unusually animated and (I can't believe I'm writing this) charismatic Zuckerberg. "We exist at the intersection between technology and social issues. Our development is guided by the fact that every year the amount that people want to share is increasing."



Included in this new wave of sharing, Facebook will automatically add photos, status updates, and life events that you share, to your timeline. You can manually add photos and content from your past, all the way back to when you were born. There's also a map feature that pinpoints every place you've been (think of the digital version of push-pins in a giant map) thanks to Facebook places. And this is really just the tip of the iceberg on the new Timeline feature which, from our testing of the developer release, appears to actually completely replace your old profile once live.

"It maps out your travel. You can even show where you were born," Zuckerberg said. As he pointed out how to preserve all the moments of your past, someone in the packed crowd behind me whispered, "this is our future."

"In the 1700's we had letter writing as an art form," wrote Bill Keeshan, Regional Sales Manager of CloudShare, on my Facebook as I sat in on the live keynote. "They really captured historical information. With the invention of the telephone, that changed our habits. So there is 50 years of dead space from an autobiographical perspective. Now [with Facebook], our lives are forever chronicled, for better or for worse. Someday, there will be timeline apps which will allow us to pick a date and see pictures, tweets, emails, wall posts, SMS messages, pictures, and videos of our lives. In a very real sense, we will live on."

The new redesign launched in beta to developers today. Also unveiled were partnerships with Netflix, Yahoo!, Spotify, Zynga and others. Check out our breakdown of all the highlights you need to know from today's Facebook event, and we'll have more coverage from inside f8 as the day goes on.

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