Anytime a new update for Facebook comes out, you can bet on opening up your newsfeed to see a significant number of complaints about it. Facebook Timeline, the new profile layout that’s being rolled out on an opt-in basis before eventually being imposed on everyone, has so far escaped this fate. Unusually, this time round there’s been 100% positive feedback from those who have signed up. Facebook could very much be on to something here.

Timeline allows users to quickly navigate through the entire history of what someone has posted on their page, based on year and month, rather than having to scroll down through postings. Details such as birth, graduation and the beginning and ending of relationships are also included, provided of course you choose to share them.

Narrative Structure

The simple act of representing postings on a timeline in a sequential order gives a narrative structure (often poigniant and laced with nostalgia) and invites the reader to fill in the context to what would otherwise would seem like random bits of information.

According to Facebook themselves, this is exactly what they are aiming for. A blurb from Sam Lessin, a product manager with the social networking bemoth, says it all:

“The (current) focus is on the most recent things you posted, (so) more important stuff slips off the page. The photos of your graduation get replaced by updates about what you had for breakfast……The way your profile works today, 99% of the stories you share vanish.”

And make no mistake, Facebook is asking you to share stories; not updates, not information but stories.

Timeline allows you to look at everything you’ve ever posted on Facebook and omit what you don’t want out there. Stories are defined by protagonists, plot, emotions and structure, all of which can be built through choosing what to omit and what to feature.

But why is this of benefit to Facebook? In a previous post, we talked about how Zuckerberg and co were attempting to build a “deeper relationship” between users and brands through the use of different verbs to describe people’s actions (being able to say you “just watched” a video as against merely pressing “like” on it).

Deeper Relationships?

How does storytelling build these deeper relationships between people and their brands? Well let’s learn from Don Draper. In the carousel pitch at the end of Season One of Mad Men (that’s the link above, embedding is disabled on all Mad Men clips – damn you AMC). Don is telling a story; that of his marriage to Betty and their raising of their two children. It isn’t spoiling things too much to say that their relationship throughout series one isn’t as rosy as that depicted in the pictures, which is of course, the point.

By not having pictures of other moments in his relationship with Betty (such as the fights and the arguments) and showing a smooth passage through time, highlighting the milestones such as their wedding day, Don creates the story of a happy marriage, as much for himself as for anyone else. This makes the product, Kodak’s Carousel, a time machine, facilitating navigation between the past and the present.

Facebook Timeline is Don Draper’s time machine in digital form, as it allows users to control how they appear to progress through time and how the story of their life develops. Interacting with those stories as well as telling their own ones is what will excite brands about this latest development.