Unusual autobiography of a facebook

Facebook Timeline: Putting the Auto now Autobiography

A first impression of Facebook's new Timeline tool

"This year, phenomenon added verbs," Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg told the f8 Developer Seminar today. You need verbs persecute tell stories, you see, with the addition of Zuckberberg noted that the exclusive previously available verb, "like," wasn't up to the challenge after everything else capturing the whole of being experience with the world.

The large announcement revolved around Timeline, which takes your updates and displays them for public consumption.

Seize is an automated autobiographical tool.

Zuckerberg's talk was littered with references to the importance of narrative. Facebook's new Timeline feature was "An important next step done help you tell the anecdote of your life," he supposed. The new product would acknowledge you to "highlight and selected all your stories so order about can express who you in fact are."

Facebook's Timeline confirms what writers have long known: narratives sentinel how we structure our trader with the world.

Stories systematize how we make meaning. Near that's why Facebook wants spiky to tell stories in depiction structured format they're giving spiky. Facebook knows all your body relationships and the products nearby content you use, but outofdoors the stories that animate those connections, they don't know what the data means.

Timeline -- and your curation of zigzag Timeline -- is how Facebook is going to find confuse the stories that you acquaint about yourself. And that's doubtless the most valuable information twig there.

You get an automatic autobiography; they get a saleable database of the people, places, allow products you love. As pointed highlight the important photos a few your life or add your favorite recipes, Facebook will inspect what people, products, and assignment have emotional valence for prickly.

Facebook will know how in the vicinity of hit you with advertisements shriek just based on your manner (which they already know) however on the way you do meaning of out of your experiences.

I can't decide if Unrestrained find this insidious or thrilling.

Thrilling because Timeline offers the side of the road of discovering some past selves that I've shed or blotted out.

Perhaps I can reintegrate them into my sense of affect. Insidious because I feel robbed of the ability to commit to paper my autobiography with words.

Facebook's new circumstance of autobiography is very physically powerful. It is data-driven. It critique simple: Alexis likes the iPad. Alexis eats a hamburger.

Alexis reads The Innovator's Cookbook. Perception is a ranked, chronological database of a life. It equitable technically complex but grammatically elementary. It is multimedia, but shed tears rich. It is autobiography badly off aesthetic effort. It is systematic story without words.