Well, now you know.

I’ve known for nearly a year that Facebook would be implementing what they are calling *Timeline*. I just didn’t know exactly when they would be launching it. So, I decided to wait until they launched *Timeline* and worked the bugs out of it before setting up a Facebook page for Saigon Kids American Community School sites.

Why?

You might ask.

So I wouldn’t have to go back and reorganize everything once *Timeline* went into effect.

Here is what’s going on with Facebook’s *Timeline* and some things you may want to do if you are on Facebook.

Facebook will begin requiring folks to change to a different user profile format called *Timeline*, making photographs, links and personal musings from the past quicker to locate.

Timeline is basically a scrapbook of your entire life on Facebook, in comparison with an overview of yourself now seen on Facebook’s traditional user profile page. When activated, Timeline replaces your present user profile.

Even though some individuals have already voluntarily changed to Timeline, Facebook hadn’t made that mandatory. Starting Tuesday, Facebook is informing some users they have 7 days to clean up their user profiles in advance of Timeline becoming automatically activated. Facebook is rolling out the necessity to others over the upcoming several weeks.

Eventually, even people who haven’t signed on to Facebook for a while are going to be automatically switched.

Timeline doesn’t reveal anything at all that wasn’t readily available for sharing previously. A lot of those older posts had always been readily available. Folks could easily get to them by continuously hitting “Older Posts,” even though most wouldn’t have bothered. Timeline lets people  jump to your older content more rapidly.

Timeline also doesn’t always reflect the fact your group of friends has probably broadened in the recent past. A get together photograph you put up in 2008 to a select few friends will be far more visible to family members, employers as well as others you might have added as friends since that time.

You’ll have a week to curate the Timeline by moving stuff around, hiding photos or featuring them more prominently on your page.

Some things to consider:

• You can change privacy settings on individual items to control who has access. You might want to narrow embarrassing photos to your closest friends or delete some posts completely, or at least hide them so only you can see them.

• You can change the date on a post. For example, if you took a few months to post photos from a trip to Portugal, you can move them to appear with other posts from the time you took that trip. You can also add where you were, retroactively using a location feature that Facebook hadn’t offered until recently.

• For major events in your life, you can click on a star to feature them more prominently. You can hide the posts you’d rather not showcase.

• Besides your traditional profile photo — your head-shot — you can add what Facebook calls a cover photo. It’s the image that will splash across the top and can be a dog, a hobby or anything else that reflects who you are. Keep in mind the dimensions are more like a movie screen than a traditional photo, so a close-up portrait of your face won’t work well, but one of you lying horizontally will. But you don’t even have to be in it.

• You can add things before you joined Facebook, back to when you were born. Life events can include when you broke your arm and whom you were with then, or when you spoke your first word or got a tattoo. You can add photos from childhood or high school as well.

• If you feel overwhelmed with so many posts to go through, start with your older ones. Those are the ones you’d need to be most careful about because you had reason to believe only a few friends would see them.

• Click on Activity Log to see all of your posts at a glance and make changes to them one by one. Open Facebook in a new browser tab first, though. That way, you can have one tab for the log and the other for the main Timeline.