The Facebook timeline is perhaps one of the most ambitious projects that we have seen on the web in a long time. Its promise? To chronologically display every moment of your life, since your birth. Scary part of the story?  They can actually pull it off. We take a look at the good, the bad and the ugly of the timeline. 

THE GOOD
Undoubtedly, the best thing about timeline is the cover photo. We all  agree. And your photos, comments, major life events, the places you have visited, the list goes on, are organised into a long scroll tabloid. Plus, the timeline organises all your information year wise. For the nostalgically driven, this new feature can be a boon.

Another welcome addition is that while your actions appear on your newsfeed, they do not get recorded on your wall. It also details how many friends you have made in a year, career changes, your new relationships, break ups, patch ups, purchases and such, using an interactive tool called Life Events.

You can now link the year in which you, for example broke a leg, put up photographs of the plastered limb, and go through all the comments and sympathy you may have garnered. Even if you can’t find the exact life event from the extensive list, you can customise a life event to say exactly what you want.

The best part about the timeline feature is that it looks beautiful. Where the old Facebook was a spartan viewing of your images, posts and thoughts, timeline transforms your user page into flawless reading, with pictures displayed aesthetically. Your personal page now displays all the information you want into a narrative that is nothing short of a leather bound book read.

The new profile also gives you the opportunity to create fresh points on your timeline, something like a scrapbook entry. Memories, new and old can be made accessible only to you or selected loved ones. A charming add-on to timeline is the map feature, which indicates all the places you’ve visited and travelled to.

THE BAD
Timeline has a few glitches that may be addressed when it goes online tentatively on 6 January, 2011. One of the interesting features that it boasts is the ability to star mark an event that you may want to bring attention to. However, the list of highlighted events is unwieldy as Facebook decides which events are highlighted. There is no clear way to highlight the events and activities of your choice without star marking it, which essentially pastes it all over your profile.

Linking images to your Life Events can become a pain, as the wanted images often don’t appear in the selection menu, even though they have been uploaded to your account images. timeline also includes on your profile older posts by others, but it doesn't include your responses. Thus a lot of the older posts come across as one-sided and out of context conversations.

THE UGLY
You don’t want timeline? Tough! After the launch, timeline will be force fed to every one of the 750 Million users that Facebook boasts. The only way to avoid it is to get off Facebook.

The scariest part of timeline is the level of detail. Everything that you have ever said, done, or posted, can come back to haunt you. The privacy settings on the timeline while good, still leaves a lot to be desired, and the only way to deal with the voyeurs and stalkers out there is to manually delete or hide your posts.

As you go down the digital years, the timeline becomes a little messy, with images overlapping each other, details getting sketchier and random posts which are out of context displayed. In that regard, timeline has hit the nail head on, because life is messy, but we don’t want our online avatars mirroring that.

Another worrying factor is that when you created your Facebook account, you did not have that many friends online or that much history that can be read. With the year wise break up, it becomes that much easier for ex flames and old foes to go through every year of your account and hold you hostage with the skeletons that may tumble out.

 Timeline is a revolution, plain and simple, which will change the way in which we are perceived online. The only question is, are we comfortable with so much detail or is it just another day in the life of Facebook?