Facebook For Dummies, 5th Edition

Chapter 4

Timeline: The Story of You

In This Chapter

• Navigating the Timeline
• Filling out and editing your Timeline information
• Sharing with your friends through your Timeline

One of the fun things about writing Facebook For Dummies has been noting what's important in my life based on the examples I use to explain certain concepts. When I wrote the first edition, I was just out of college and every example usually related to Ultimate Frisbee, whether it was posting photos (of a Frisbee game) or planning an event (like a Frisbee match). By the second edition, I'd been working a little bit longer and used examples related to some really fun travels I'd taken. The third edition was all about my wedding, the fourth about my time in grad school, and for this edition, my new baby makes more than a few cameos. As it turns out, your life can change a lot over the course of several years.

That moment of looking backward and seeing how far you've come is the idea behind the Facebook Timeline. Like many websites, Facebook wants you to establish a profile with the basic biographical information — where you're from, what you do, where you went to school. But in addition to that, Facebook also wants you to keep updating and posting and sharing and marking events that define you. Then it turns all that information into a virtual scrapbook that you and your friends can explore. That virtual scrapbook is your Timeline.

Although Facebook does a lot of the work, this is your Timeline, so all aspects ...