Facebook has finally introduced its much-publicized profile revamp called “Timeline.” Now, user profiles appear in a digital scrapbook format organized chronologically, which highlights the most important and memorable moments of your life—on Facebook. The new format has garnered praise, and criticism from users concerned about their profile privacy. Previously, there was no way to review a profile’s history without clicking into oblivion. Now, Timeline makes your entire Facebook activity history easily searchable—and highlights the stand-out moments (including the posts that received the most attention, which could be a drunk party photo that you’d prefer your new coworkers not see). The bad news for those not eager to revisit their past is that eventually all Facebook users will have to adopt the Timeline format. The good news? You can do some damage control before your Timeline goes live. Here’s a cheat sheet to protect your privacy on Timeline.
Make Changes Within Seven Days. You can choose to activate Timeline now or wait until Facebook converts all profiles, but the most important thing to know is that whenever the transition happens, you will have seven days after notification to make all necessary edits to your profile before it goes live. You can push your profile live at any time during these seven days, but after that it will publish automatically.
Review Your Activity Log. The Activity Log is where you can see all your Facebook activity from the beginning, review the privacy settings of certain posts, and feature, hide, or delete all posts. Only you can see your Activity Log, so use it as your dashboard to review your content. One good first step before you start adjusting is to automatically make all posts viewable only to friends (this way only your personal network can see your Timeline when it goes live, regardless of previous privacy settings). Go to your Privacy Settings page, click “Limit the Audience for Previous Post,” click “Manage Past Post Visibility,” and select “Limit Old Posts.” You can then adjust the visibility of individual posts later.
Hide Posts You Don’t Want Anyone to See. As you review your profile, you can hide—or delete—anything cringe-worthy or questionable content, including photos, comments, status updates, etc. In the Activity Log, click on the circle icon, and select “Hidden on Timeline” or “Delete Post.” If you’re reviewing the post on your timeline page, hover over the top right corner of the post and click the pencil icon to see your visibility options.
Limit the Posts You Want Some People to See. For those posts you only want specific people to see, go to your timeline page, click the “people” icon by your name, and select the appropriate group you want to grant visibility to (including custom, in which you can select particular people).
Preserve Posts Only You Want to See. If there is a post in your Timeline you want to keep, but you don’t want your network to see, you can make it visible only to you by clicking the pencil icon and selecting “Only Me.” Note: You can only do this to your own posts, not those made by others.
Review Your Timeline. When you’re ready to publish, you can review what your timeline will look like to other people by clicking the gear icon and selecting “View As.”
Whether you hop on the Timeline train today or wait until you have to, consider carefully what information you share on Facebook and all your social networks.
Can’t you make changes after it goes live?
well done – thanks for sharing!
Can’t Facebook take away the ticker on the upper right of the Facebook News Feed? It’s really quite annoying. Who wants to know what your friends are doing (except their statuses, of course) like commenting on a photo or a Facebook status, right?
Thanks for that useful info. I don’t like the Timeline idea so it is good to know what I can do about it, given that we are getting it like or not. Thanks.
People worry that timeline will put their entire lives on display or require a seemingly infinite amount of time to customize. Neither of these has to be true!
Timeline will become mandatory for all users on Facebook over the coming weeks. When it hits your profile, you’ll have seven days to change your privacy settings or they’ll default to ones set by Facebook.
You don’t have to go through every single item shown on the timeline to hide them. You can set a default level of visibility by clicking on the down arrow in the uppermost right-hand corner of any screen on Facebook and clicking on privacy settings in the pulldown menu.
Scroll down on the resulting page, and you’ll see that the second-to-last item says “limit the audience for past posts,” and to the right of them are the words are the linked “manage past post visibility.” Click on the link and a pop-up window appears.
How can i go back to my old profile style?
Unfortunately, users cannot revert to their old profile.
is there anyway to remove the “subscribe” button on my facebook account as to not let people subscribe to me?
You can check out this site to help you edit “subscriptions” to your Facebook: http://nativeblogger.com/2011/09/how-to-add-and-remove-subscribe-button-in-facebook/
When I click on the circle as shown above it only shows the “delete post” option. No option to “hide” the post!!
And this is for all my activity log..
I really want to hide my activity!!!!!!! I just want to share the activity with the people I share it with them!!!
That is strange. Clicking on the edit button should give you the option to remove from your timeline.
Can you hide a comment you typed from being displayed in your timeline for example??
i can’t figure out hwo to hide comments i’ve typed, say in groups/likedpages. Any of my friends who are also in that group or like whatever company will also see it, regardless. I find this really annoying and almost enough reason to quite Facebook. Your only option is to delete the post.
They are forcing us out!!!!!
If I were google+, I would create a “migration” tool that takes your last updates and friend list from facebook to google+. Otherwise, they won’t be able to create volume transitions..
hi there, can i temporary prevent everyone to visit every change to my profile photo?
Example: i trying to crop and apply photo for my profile photo, so i don’t like to notify everyone.
thank you before,
When you change your profile picture, it will make a posting on your Timeline. You can simply “hide from timeline”.