People around the world began seeing messages from Facebook on Thursday encouraging them to start scrapbooking their life.
The service's new Timeline profiles, which Facebook introduced nearly three months ago at its annual conference, is now available to any of the site's 800 million users who decide to activate it. Soon, Facebook will turn it on for everybody with an alert at the top of profiles, the company said in a blog post. Timeline will arrange a user's posts, photos and important milestones (weddings, births of children, etc.) chronologically in two columns of information, with a blue line marked by dates running vertically down the middle. On the right, visitors can easily skip to certain months or years to see what was happening at that time in a person's life, and below that is advertisements.
In addition to a standard profile picture, users can now set a cover photo, a large shot that appears at the top of each Timeline profile.
Facebook has said the idea behind Timeline is to chronicle someone's life and its major events over many years instead of the social network's current profile pages, which tend to emphasize the here and now.