Facebook testing Timeline tweak with better member snapshots

Facebook Timeline, the company’s most recent take on the profile page that attempts to capture and highlight a person’s significant life events, is having a life-altering moment of its own.

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The social network is testing a tweaked Timeline design, first discovered by Talking Points Memo, that attempts to better summarize and showcase the key details about a member. Facebook confirmed the test to VentureBeat.

“We can confirm this is a small test, but don’t have anything further to share at this time,” a Facebook spokesperson told VentureBeat.

Timeline, the radical and semi-controversial re-imagining of the profile, was released for all users in December. The tweaks in testing are relatively minor adjustments to the status quo, and essentially condense a user’s basic info and boxes (for apps, photos, friends, et cetera) to provide a better snapshot of a person’s life.

“The new look creates subtle but noticeable changes to the top of user profiles, chiefly moving the user’s name, home location, occupation, education, and other basic information into a layer of text atop the “cover photo,” Talking Points Memo described.

What strikes us as most interesting, however, is that Facebook seems to be rethinking the structure of the boxes currently shown alongside a user’s “About” details. In the test, the boxes have been bumped up to just below the Cover Photo and truncated to just text. There’s also a new “Summary” box that, according to Talking Points Memo, lists out a person’s major life events. And the “Likes” box has been renamed to “Favorites.”

Facebook often tests pre-release and experimental features in small batches, so there are no guarantees on when or if the rest of us will see these changes. These Timeline adjustments, however, would appear to be a natural evolution of the Timeline design.

Meanwhile, Facebook shares continue to lose value on Wall Street as the social network struggles to live up to expectations in the first few days following a marred opening day. At the time of this post, Facebook was trading at close to $32, which is down $6 or almost 16 percent from its $38 starting price and almost 24 percent from its $42 opening on the NASDAQ.

Photo credits: Shutterstock and Talking Points Memo

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