Zuckerberg Reveals Timeline, A Whole New Facebook At f8 2011 [Video]

This year at the Facebook developer conference, Andy Sandberg introduced himself as Mark Zuckerberg and showed off their newest feature – the Slow Poke, a poke that takes 24 hours to reach the person being poked, plenty of time to be cancelled by the obviously drunk sender. Zuckerberg replaced him about 5 minutes into his mindless rant to mild applause and Mark himself continued on with the usual milestone listing. Half a billion people signing on in one day, for example. Then he went on to note that apps and depth of engagement were the next "way of the future," this future having very much to do with the way you present yourself with Facebook – the new way being Timeline.

Zuckerberg continued by noting that the Profile is what Facebook considers one of the central tenants of engagement. The first five minutes of your social network conversation, that is, with the next 15 minutes going to "what I did recently" aka your status. It ends there (except for those that click "more" forever if they like), until now.

Timeline is the story of your life all your stories, all your apps, and a new way to express who you are. The way "the story of your life" aka Timeline works is to show everything you've got, everything you've had, summarizing more and more, making your content smaller and smaller as you reach further into the past. To get to a certain year, you can click on a year in your upper right-hand corner. Once you get to a piece of your past that you want to see more in-depth, you've only to hover over a piece and it'll expand. All of the events in your life (on Facebook) made simply accessible.

Timeline can be filtered down to one type of content. You can view by photos, for example, this showing you basically one gigantic gallery of every photo from your past. There's also a Map Timeline that shows places you've been, this connecting to posts from that part of your life. Timeline will be expanded (in detail) throughout f8.

A new component has been added that appears to work quite well in regards to apps, that being what they're calling "Reports." Your app now has its own Timeline, all of it broken down into Reports that show individual pieces of content from different times in the past. See how many times you harvested your grain! You can add an app to your Timeline, each time you want to do so you've only to click "add to Timeline" and you'll be able to see a preview. Simple stuff, integrated simply.

Essentially the same way you can highlight stories and posts on any number of blogging platforms on the internet, you can now edit your Timeline to make it look like what you want. You can edit your past (to a degree) and you can highlight as much as you want – making a particular story appear massively, for example, in comparison to the rest of the stories. You can also change the header image for your page, this being the monstrous image at the top of your Timeline.

The story of your life.

All your stories

All your apps

and A new way to express who you are.

We'll be covering the rest of f8 2011 throughout the day, stay tuned for more coverage.