Facebook warning over user history - The West Australian

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Facebook warning over user history - The West Australian:

LOUISE BURKE SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR, The West Australian
January 30, 2012, 5:42 am


Facebook users will be given seven days to delete old posts and photographs they would rather forget before their entire history on the social network goes on display in an easily accessible format.

After rolling out its new-look "timeline" profile voluntarily over the past few months, Facebook said on its official blog this week that it was preparing to move every one of its 800 million users over to the format.

The changes come as Google announced that it would start targeting teenagers by allowing users as young as 13 to use its social network Google+, which was previously aimed only at adults.

The changes bring Google into direct competition with the world's biggest social network.

In Facebook's biggest design overhaul, the timeline dredges up historical information about a user and presents it in an easy access chronology from the date they joined.

It also asks users to update important life events from before the network was invented, such as graduations, marriages and births.

"Millions of people curate stories of their lives on Facebook every day and have no way to share them once they fall off your profile page," Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told the F8 developers' conference last year.

"It's the story of your life and a completely new way to express yourself."

Facebook said the change would occur over the next few weeks but users would be given seven days from when their account was changed over to preview content before it went live.

One of the key features of the timeline will be the increased focus on "frictionless sharing", where users can allow applications to track online activities on certain websites, automatically broadcasting what they are reading, listening to, watching or even where they are running.

Once a user signs up to these applications, they are not asked for further permission before this information is broadcast.

The move has been criticised because users can easily forget they have signed up and click on items they may not have intended to share.

The pressure to share ever more personal information comes as a survey in Britain found a quarter of people had regretted something they put on a social media site, mostly because it had been inappropriate or had upset someone.

A survey of 2000 people on behalf of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust found that nearly half felt social media had replaced face-to-face interaction.

More than a quarter said something on social media they would never say to a person's face.

How to clean up your timeline:

·Go to the Introducing Timeline page and click "get timeline".·You will have seven days to review before it is published.

·See how it looks by clicking the gear-shaped settings menu, then "view as".

·You can now see how it looks to the public, or a friend.

·Explore the content and click "feature" or "hide" to expand or remove items.

·Add important dates such as graduations and weddings.

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