Facebook rolls out Timeline feature

Facebook has started making its Timeline feature available to the approximately two million Facebook users living in New Zealand.

Facebook has started making its Timeline feature available to the approximately two million Facebook users living in New Zealand.

Facebook's Timeline acts like a digital diary, presenting a comprehensive and ongoing snapshot of your life on the social networking site. It showcases a chronological history of the most important moments in your life, collating (user-selected) pictures, videos, significant status updates and event "likes" that have been uploaded to Facebook.

"Starting today, we are making Timeline more widely available as we measure speed and other types of performance," said Facebook Project manager Samuel Lessin in a December 6 update on the Tell Your Story with Timeline blog post. "We'll begin by making it available to people in New Zealand and then roll it out more broadly in the near future."

New Zealand-based Facebook users will be given the opportunity to fill out and modify their Timeline during a seven-day period before making it available to their friends to view.

More than one million developers (or people who were willing to pose as developers to try out the new feature) have already started creating their own Facebook Timeline on the site by signing up for the developer beta, said Facebook.

Timeline was first announced in September of this year and promoted as "an easy way to rediscover the things you shared, and collect all your best moments in a single place." It has been praised and criticized by users and privacy advocates alike.

Timeline is an added feature that also helps Facebook differentiate itself from rival social networks Google+ and Twitter.