Davide Cassenti

It was a long time Facebook did not introduce any new feature on its platform and the new Google+ certainly gave a speed-up to their usually slow development cycle. Although they say all the changes were already planned – and probably most of them really were – I think they were much inspired by the new Big G’s creature: it is now easier to share with the people you want, even if not as easy as with Circles, to follow people without being friends and even translate posts - only from pages and only if you have the Translation app installed - as you can do with a popular extension on Google+.

The biggest change, however, it’s their new Timeline: if you are a developer you can test it out already, but only other developers can see it once you publish. I’ve been using it for a few days and I must say it is the best innovation they introduced on the social network since I started using it in 2007: right now your profile has become a diary of your present and past events, giving everyone a better idea about you.

You can add photos and life events any time on your Timeline: the day you got a diploma, when you get married, there is even a “lost a loved one” option; you can add single pictures in the Timeline, but no albums – a limitation from my point of view, since it would be nice to add a bunch of pictures back in the past; but, most important, you can check all the posts – now called stories – you wrote since you joined the site. And here it comes the dark side of the moon.

Although it was indeed possible to check previous posts, by clicking on the Older Posts button on someone’s Wall again and again, it is now incredibly easier to do it: you have a list of years on the right, you can simply click on them and immediatly see the most important stories – according to Facebook’s ideas – for that year; the more you go to the past, the less posts you see, but you can always click on a link to see more and more stories.

The real problem here is the privacy then: if you can survive your jealous girlfriend, looking at the messages you wrote to your previous one before you met, you might find uncomfortable that everyone could watch out what you were doing years ago. Yes, you can always decide who can see what, but changing all your previous posts is a long task and most of the people are still not even used to change the privacy for new stories, keeping posting publicly without probably know they’re doing so.

I was also wondering about one other aspect: what would people do if Facebook would start asking money for using the service? There have been a lot of hoaxes about it, of course all fake – side note: do not believe a post saying such thing, since Facebook will tell you directly about any of their changes - and it is something that probably will never happen, but if it will be the case, would people be able to leave the site and jump on another social network? Once you have all your life’s pictures saved up there, would a few dollars per year - $1 per user would means over $500M for Facebook every 12 months! - make you abandon it all and start over again?

Isn’t our life too much connected to the social network? Or are we still able to decide on our own?