NEW YORK (AP) — Facebook will start requiring people to switch to a new profile format known as Timeline, making photos, links and personal musings from the past much easier to find.
Timeline is essentially a scrapbook of your whole life on Facebook, compared with a snapshot of you today found on Facebook's traditional profile page. Once activated, Timeline replaces the current profile.
Although some people have already voluntarily switched to Timeline, Facebook hadn't made that mandatory. Beginning Tuesday, Facebook is telling some users that they have seven days to clean up their profiles before Timeline gets automatically activated. Facebook is rolling out the requirement to others over the next few weeks.
At some point, even those who haven't logged on to Facebook in a while will be automatically switched.
Timeline doesn't expose anything that wasn't available for sharing in the past. Many of those older posts had always been available. People could get to them by continually hitting "Older Posts," although most wouldn't have bothered. Timeline allows people to jump to the older material more quickly.
Timeline also doesn't necessarily reflect the fact that your circle of friends has likely expanded in recent years. A party photo you posted in 2008 to a small group of friends would be more visible to relatives, bosses and others you may have added as friends since then.