Facebook rolled out its new timeline profile to everyone last week. Like a kid in a candy store, I clicked-through and put mine together.

Positives

1. It’s Prettier: For the first time, Facebook added a much needed aesthetic touch to its platform. The large cover photo gives people a great way to showcase something epic to represent themself.
2. Timeline Functionality: This added functionality is killer. It increases content lifespan and allows users and creepers to easily navigate the entire history of your being on Facebook. Kinda creepy? No doubt. However, thanks to pressure from Google+, Facebook’s privacy setting have gotten much better so you have the option to hide anything you want. Aside from utility, this functionality cements Facebook’s permanency in the lives of millions of people. It is hands down the best way to reminisce and document a person’s life, and something that will be hard to replace due to its ubiquity.
3. Action Buttons: Below the cover art there are now four action buttons that make it easy to navigate to some of Facebook’s most important content - friends, photos, maps, and likes. Maps is the new kid on the block. It’s an entirely new feature set that provides an incredibly cool experience for documenting travel. You can say where you lived, where you’ve vacationed, etc, and add photos and stories to each one. In short, Facebook is going to be making a big push to get more location information with every post and photo, and this is a great incentive to do so.

Negatives

1. Cover Photo Repetition: Despite its aesthetic appeal, my problem with the cover photo is that it can be a bit repetitive to set that along with the profile picture. I don’t want to have a picture of my face as my profile picture and then another picture of me w/ friends as the cover art. It just comes off as a bit narcissistic - ideal if you buy into that whole Gen Y stereotype. Hence, why I opted to have a picture of my obnoxiously decorated cube instead.
2. Timeline Consumption: The navigation and functionality of the timeline is fantastic, but its overall hard to consume. I don’t like the side-by-side layout. It’s confusing and doesn’t lend itself well to the linear nature of a timeline. I will note that it may just be that its a large change from Facebook’s norm in the past, so its likely my distaste will dwindle the more I use it.
3. Activity Log: Why is this separate from notifications? What is its distinct purpose? At first glance, I feel the two could and should be integrated.

Overall, I give the new timeline profiles a B+. Facebook made some huge strides with it, however there’s still a few holes I’d like to see patched up.

In April, I wrote a post completely bashing Twitter for its faults on Tech.li. These faults consisted of the following:

1. Conversation
2. Discovery
3. Content Lifespan
4. Dumb People

But after using #newnewtwitter for the past week, I have to admit that the Twitter team has reconciled all their weaknesses and that I am officially falling back in love with the platform.

For those of you that haven’t played around with #newnewtwitter, here’s what I mean.

First of all, conversation is a million times better. Replies are threaded as they should have been from the beginning. You can simply click on and reply and the full conversation unravels right in front of you in-stream.

Second, content discovery is now structured, easy to navigate, and a major focus of the re-design. All you have to do is click #discover at the top of the page and tweets around popular topics are bundled dynamically - regardless of whether or not they include a specific hashtag. 

They also added a “Browse Categories” tab where you can easily find the top users in major verticals like music, technology, and more.

Third, the issue of content lifespan has finally been resolved as tweets are now embeddable - meaning that I can simply click a button and embed tweets into any website for permanent display.

Fourth, the dumb people that I spoke about have all disappeared! Well, not really, but this re-design is sure to improve things. By placing major focus on @mentions and #hashtags in the re-design, users will become better educated on the purpose of Twitter and how to use it to its full potential. 

In conclusion, Twitter absolutely killed it with their new re-design. I’m pumped about all the changes, and despite recent departures from the company, I’m confidant in the future of this platform.