New Facebook profile Timeline available to New Zealanders first

Back in September, Facebook announced an impending new profile - Timeline.

Remember how your profile used to be, all information list-y with a run down of your every activity, be it comment, photo, activity attended or more?

Preceding the user comment that Timeline looked tailor made for stalkers, the Facebook blog post said the problem with them old school profiles is information slips off into the 'Older posts' domain, to be replaced by newer updates.

"But since the focus is on the most recent things you posted, more important stuff slips off the page. The photos of your graduation get replaced by updates about what you had for breakfast."

Enter Timeline, a wider and more visual profile, Facebook says.  And it's rolling it out to New Zealanders first.

It includes a 'cover' or giant photo of your choice and allows users to add activities they want to remember (with favouriting an activity making it double in size).  Users can also add apps to Timeline and others can join in by, for instance, listening to the same song. 

Facebook made the new feature available to developers building apps on its platform, and over a million people had signed up for the beta, and yesterday announced the beginning of its roll out.

"Starting today, we are making Timeline more widely available as we measure speed and other types of performance. We'll begin by making it available to people in New Zealand and then roll it out more broadly in the near future."

Timeline was described by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in September as a new way for users to express themselves.

And media are reporting that privacy controls seem fairly robust - the aforementioned blog post talks of a private activity log to hide or add activity to the Timeline.  But Forbes.com reported last month that the new profile feature, which it described as essentially a scrapbook of a user's life, would require users to do privacy housekeeping as they curated what from the past they wanted friends to see.

And the change to Timeline would eventually be mandatory, Forbes reported.