Back to list
Jesse Eisenberg may have played Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as a Vulcan-like cypher in The Social Network, but the real Zuck is anything but emotionally distant. When he's talking about Facebook, in fact, he's generally downright ebullient. And I've never seen him more exuberantly cheerful than he was during his keynote address at his company's f8 conference in San Francisco last week.
Zuckerberg had two major pieces of news to share. First, he announced that Facebook is replacing its Profile -- the page each user gets that displays his or her status updates, Likes, photos, FarmVille triumphs and other items -- with a radically revised version called Timeline, which is rolling out over the next few weeks.
(Watch TIME's video on the new Facebook interface.)
Timeline is prettier than Profile: you can, for instance, add an oversize "cover" photo at the top along with your portrait. More important, it makes it a cinch to backtrack through a member's entire Facebook history, not just recent activities. It preserves every action of every member and attempts to emphasize the most memorable ones, such as marriages and job changes. You can even fill in your pre-Facebook existence by adding photos dating back to your birth.
Facebook's other big update, Open Graph, aims to change the social network even more than Timeline will. It lets third-party companies connect their apps and services to Facebook far more seamlessly than in the past -- and in particular allows them to seek onetime, blanket permission from a user to share stuff with Facebook. Once permission has been granted, the apps can push out the details of everything the user does, no further human intervention required.
Zuckerberg had two major pieces of news to share. First, he announced that Facebook is replacing its Profile -- the page each user gets that displays his or her status updates, Likes, photos, FarmVille triumphs and other items -- with a radically revised version called Timeline, which is rolling out over the next few weeks.
(Watch TIME's video on the new Facebook interface.)
Timeline is prettier than Profile: you can, for instance, add an oversize "cover" photo at the top along with your portrait. More important, it makes it a cinch to backtrack through a member's entire Facebook history, not just recent activities. It preserves every action of every member and attempts to emphasize the most memorable ones, such as marriages and job changes. You can even fill in your pre-Facebook existence by adding photos dating back to your birth.
Facebook's other big update, Open Graph, aims to change the social network even more than Timeline will. It lets third-party companies connect their apps and services to Facebook far more seamlessly than in the past -- and in particular allows them to seek onetime, blanket permission from a user to share stuff with Facebook. Once permission has been granted, the apps can push out the details of everything the user does, no further human intervention required.