How To Enable Facebook Timeline

Today at Facebook’s f8 conference in San Francisco, CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stage to unveil the next evolution of the service. The first major change? The Profile.

Zuckerberg noted that the original Profile was sort of like the last five minutes of your life. The updated Proile from 2008 extended that to show what was sort of like the last 15 minutes or your life. The new Profile unveiled today is “the rest,” Zuckerberg noted. He calls this feature Timeline.

“It’s the heart of your Facebook experience, completely rethought from the ground up,” Zuckerberg says, noting that they’ve been working on it all year. “Timeline is the story of your life.”

What Zuckerberg showed was a beautiful new Profile that is much more visual than anything Facebook has done before. To be honest, it looks a bit like a really nice Tumblr blog. It has three main parts:

And it goes all the way back to when you were born.

Enabling Timeline a bit early isn’t too difficult — but it’s not at all straight forward, either.

You see, Facebook is enabling Timeline early for open graph developers. You, too, can be an open graph developer — even if you’re just looking to dabble.

 

- You probably don’t want to do this unless you’re actually a developer. Expect bugs.

- Only you will see your timeline at first (unless you decide otherwise), but it will automatically go public after a few days. My timeline was automatically hard-set to go public on September 29th.

- It seems that if you login into Facebook on another machine, Timeline gets disabled automatically on all of your machines. With that said, it seems you can get back to your timeline (but ONLY after following the steps below) by navigating to http://www.facebook.com/YOURUSERNAMEHERE?sk=timeline

- You’ll need to have a “verified” account for one of the steps, which means you need a credit card or phone number attached to the account.

1. Log into Facebook

 

2. Enable developer mode, if you haven’t already. To do this, type “developer” into the Facebook search box, click the first result and add the app.

3. Jump into the developer app

 

4. Create a new app.  Give your new app any display name and namespace you Like. Read and agree to the Platform Privacy agreement. This is the step you need to be verified for i.e you should have verified a Credit Card Number of a Mobile Number with Facebook.

 

5. Enter your new app’s main settings screen.

 

6. Look for the “Open Graph” header, and click the “Get Started using open graph” link.

Create a test action for your app, like “read” a “book”, or “eat” a “sandwich” ( Open Graph Suggestions)

7. This should drop you into an action type configuration page. Change a few of the default settings and click through all three pages of settings.

 

8. Wait for a Minute or so.

 

9. Go back to your Facebook homescreen. An invite to “try Timeline” should be waiting at the top of the page.

 

10. And you’re done! We have seen this work quite a few times now, so it should work without a hitch for just about anyone.