I have five predictions of how Facebook will be maturing in the first year after its IPO:

1. Search

Facebook has become home base for users in many ways. But when it comes to search, Facebook makes you take a bus transfer at Google every time you want to leave the house.

And that’s a shame, because Google starts each search from a place of knowing almost nothing about me. When I’m taking a vacation to Bali, I’m far less interested in Google’s generic recommendations of things to do than I am in recommendations from my friends who have been there.

Facebook already knows which of my friends have been to Bali, and which restaurants and attractions they liked the best. It can even differentiate between the friend I trust for restaurant recs and the friend who always finds the best surfing spots.

There is a clear battle between Google and Facebook. But it’s not over “search vs. discovery,” as it is often framed. Rather, it’s “transaction vs. relationship” — which is why Facebook has the potential to disrupt search as we know it.

Prediction: Facebook will launch a purely social search by the end of 2012 (before tackling the whole hog in 2013).

2. Advertising

Despite the company’s fierce ethos of consumer experience first, business concerns second, an IPO will inevitably put upward pressure on the latter. With the numbers published quarterly and the prices reset every day, Facebook will be forced to support that share price (if not for the sake of its shareholders, then at least for its employees!) by expanding its advertising revenues.

Facebook today brings in quarterly ad revenue of $872M — just a tiny fraction of Google’s $9B. But transactions are by nature pecuniary — and relationships are priceless. As a gatekeeper to nearly a billion consumer relationships, Facebook can roll out new advertising products that are far more valuable than AdWords.

The market for online brand advertising is already huge at $85B today. As soon as Facebook unlocks the potential of relationship-based advertising, the market will open up by tens of billions more.

Prediction: By Q2 2013, Facebook will have more than tripled ad revenues to $3B per quarter.

3. Open Graph

Occupy Facebook! Oh wait, we already do. Or does Facebook occupy us? Facebook currently occupies 1 in 7 minutes of all time spent online.

As the locus of consumer identity, attention and relationships, Facebook has the potential to be the one true platform that links together every destination on the web.

But it’s not there yet. Open Graph was a start, but it lacks a complete and actionable vision for how publishers can connect, access data and establish relationships. Publishers don’t want bits and pieces of data that they need to analyze themselves — they want a unified schema that bridges their audiences’ online worlds and real lives.

When I buy a chicken at Whole Foods using a Facebook app’s mobile grocery coupon, Facebook can match that incoming data point with the fact that I read Cooks Illustrated and that I’ve been on an Indian food kick lately (based on my restaurant check-ins). By the time that chicken is in my reusable bag and I’m hauling it out the door, there should be chicken curry recipe suggestions on my Facebook page.

Facebook has an opportunity to turn data from the long tail of Facebook apps into real inferences about you and me that publishers and other brands on the web can actually use.

Prediction: Facebook will completely redesign their analytics offering by Q2 2013 to provide not just data but real, integrated audience insights that will guide brands’ personalization efforts.

4. Commerce and Currency

Advertising won’t be the only revenue play Facebook makes in its first year as a public company.

Digital commerce (i.e. digital goods) already represents more than $16B in market size, and is projected to grow to $36B globally by 2014. E-commerce is another $680B on top of that. Both are currently conducted by arcane means: Visa card numbers and PayPal accounts.

Why have digital payments been so slow to evolve? Because even the most trusting of us only allow a few close associates access to our most private details. Who knows me the best? My bank, my lawyer, my mother and Facebook. In fact, no one owns my identity as well as Facebook these days (sorry, Mom!). Just because Facebook doesn’t have access to my wallet yet doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen.

A host of companies today (Google, Apple, Square) are trying to become your digital wallet, but Facebook holds a valuable advantage: it is already the locus of your relationships with third-party Web sites through Open Graph. While the logistics will certainly be no piece of cake, commerce is right up Facebook’s alley.

Prediction: By Q2 2013, Facebook will be presiding over $2B in transactions.

5. Timeline

There’s nothing more core to Facebook than its user experience, and Facebook has since its birth shown a consistent healthy dissatisfaction with it no matter what the status quo.

The current timeline experience is a nice try, but it’s not quite right. Timeline solved one problem — the indigestible frequency and quantity of updates at all levels of priority — while creating several more. New Problem #1: Timeline’s intuition about what’s important is too frequently just plain wrong. And while it gives us a great retrospective on people, it does a surprisingly poor job of helping us stay up to date with them. New Problem #2: Timeline depends heavily on Open Graph widgets to summarize our lives.

The latter is both ambitious and troubling. We admire great biographers for their ability to identify and communicate the essence of a person. It’s an insult say that a Nike Fuel score algorithm can capture the “real me” in the same way.

Timeline is a v1 product. It will take significant and deep tuning over many versions to reach its full potential.

This may seem like it’s just a UI update, but it’s not. Timeline is the clearinghouse for everything that happens on Facebook. Getting Timeline right is probably the single most valuable thing Facebook can do to grow its effectiveness with users — and its revenues.

Prediction: Facebook will release the first major redesign of Timeline by the first half of 2013.

Will the precocious kid that Facebook is today grow into a smart, savvy adult? A boatload of investors and J.P. Morgan certainly seem to think so. Over the long term, it will depend on Facebook’s ability to leave its youthful single-minded focus on users behind and execute consistently against two metrics: great user experience and revenues to match.

This is a guest post by Ben Elowitz (@elowitz). Elowitz is the co-founder and CEO of next-generation media company Wetpaint, and the author of the Digital Quarters blog about the future of digital media. Prior to Wetpaint, Elowitz co-founded Blue Nile (NILE).

If you want a quick analysis of why Facebook would pay $1 billion for popular photo-sharing service Instagram, please ignore the obvious financials that just don’t add up at all and have most of the typically unshockable digerati shocked by the sheer amount of the price.

Actually, it’s pretty simple: Photos. Photos. And, oh yes, mobile photos — lots and lots and lots of them.

Astonishingly, Facebook users already upload an average of more than 250 million images daily, making it the most popular photo-sharing service on the Web.

But it’s not the best by far and not the most mobile, which is Facebook’s biggest weakness — that has been accomplished many others, especially Instagram, the favorite of power users who scoffed at Facebook’s weak tools. (The horror of no filters!)

Now — instead of all those billions of juicy digital photos snapped by an ever-growing legion of smartphone users loading up to the beautifully designed Instagram mobile app and living on the servers of the small San Francisco-based start-up — Facebook has now captured all these memories for its massive social networking site.

And while $1 billion seems an awful lot to pay for that privilege — Twitter is quaking with “OMG!” and “Wow!” and “WTF!” tweets about the acquisition — this is apparently priceless for Facebook in a deal that went down quickly and quietly in recent weeks.

That and the fact that the huge sum prevented Instagram from being scooped up by Google.

It’s a clear signal from CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg — who rules all product efforts at the company — of his intent to dominate all innovations that have to do with owning the social experience.

Because while many Instagram photos quickly made their way onto Facebook — sharing on the service, as well as on Twitter, was a big part of the app’s offering — the future of the Menlo Park, Calif.-based company is tied to having control over key elements of the user experience.

Of all of those — communications, status updates, content linking — it has been photos that have become perhaps the most important part of Facebook, almost since its beginnings.

Photos are what allowed Facebook to grow so quickly and what made it more than just a blue sea of text and links to consumers. Its new Timeline depends on big, pretty photos, and Facebook even recently announced that it would allow full-screen viewing of high-resolution photos on its Web site, a pricey endeavor.

So, perhaps it was inevitable that Zuckerberg would pay up for Instagram, too — he knows a good entrepreneurial success when he sees one and apparently has the power to convince start-ups that he can make their bigger dreams come true.

Whether or not Instagram ever makes money is perhaps beside the point at this moment in time, as Facebook is poised to go public at 100 times the amount it forked over for Instagram.

But that it considers such a purchase worth as much as one percent of its expected valuation says a thousands words. And most of those words are “mobile” and “photo.”

As Ben Jacobs noted on Twitter: “Kodak goes bankrupt and Instagram is worth a billion dollars. 2012, y’all.”

Indeed. And, I have no doubt if Zuckerberg could figure out a way to shove all those Kodak moments from analog snapshots onto Facebook easily, he’d have paid up for that, too.

Facebook has just announced that it will acquire Instagram, the popular mobile photo-sharing service, for $1 billion in cash and shares.

The social networking giant posted on the acquisition, its biggest yet, on its site, as well as on CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg’s Timeline on Facebook.

Photos are critically important for Facebook, which has been slow to innovate in the fast-growing mobile arena in the important consumer space. By contrast, Instagram has taken the arena by storm, with its delightful and elegant app and the motto, “Fast beautiful photo sharing.”

Consumers have responded (including me — it is the only non-communications app I use many times a day). The San Francisco-based company — with only 13 employees — had 30 million Apple iPhone users before it came to Google’s Android last week, where it got more than a million new users in just 12 hours.

Still, despite all the usage, Instagram had not articulated a plan for, you know, making money. Now, that will presumably be Facebook’s problem to solve.

The Facebook acquisition has been kept very quiet, with its CEO Kevin Systrom working on it in conjunction with new fundraising efforts that would have valued the company at $500 million. Liz Gannes reported on this effort last week, which was poised to close, in fact, before the Facebook deal was struck over the weekend.

Until now, Instagram has received Series A funding of $7 million led by Benchmark Capital just over a year ago, when it only had 1.75 million registered users.

Seed investors include Andreessen Horowitz — which did not follow on later — and Baseline Ventures. Also in the Benchmark round: Twitter creator Jack Dorsey, former Facebooker Adam D’Angelo and Chris Sacca.

In a blog post titled “Instagram + Facebook,” Systrom promised no change, except for the $1 billion mountain of cash:

“It’s important to be clear that Instagram is not going away. We’ll be working with Facebook to evolve Instagram and build the network … The Instagram app will still be the same one you know and love.”

Zuckerberg also promised that Facebook would keep Instagram independent, and that such a large purchase would be rare for the company, which is set to go public soon.

“This is an important milestone for Facebook because it’s the first time we’ve ever acquired a product and company with so many users,” he wrote. “We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all.”

Here is the full press release from Facebook:

Facebook to Acquire Instagram

MENLO PARK, CALIF. — April 9, 2012 — Facebook announced today that it has reached an agreement to acquire Instagram, a fun, popular photo-sharing app for mobile devices.

The total consideration for San Francisco-based Instagram is approximately $1 billion in a combination of cash and shares of Facebook. The transaction, which is subject to customary closing conditions, is expected to close later this quarter.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, posted about the transaction on his Timeline:

I’m excited to share the news that we’ve agreed to acquire Instagram and that their talented team will be joining Facebook.

For years, we’ve focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family. Now, we’ll be able to work even more closely with the Instagram team to also offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests.

We believe these are different experiences that complement each other. But in order to do this well, we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook.

That’s why we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people.

We think the fact that Instagram is connected to other services beyond Facebook is an important part of the experience. We plan on keeping features like the ability to post to other social networks, the ability to not share your Instagrams on Facebook if you want, and the ability to have followers and follow people separately from your friends on Facebook.

These and many other features are important parts of the Instagram experience and we understand that. We will try to learn from Instagram’s experience to build similar features into our other products. At the same time, we will try to help Instagram continue to grow by using Facebook’s strong engineering team and infrastructure.

This is an important milestone for Facebook because it’s the first time we’ve ever acquired a product and company with so many users. We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all. But providing the best photo sharing experience is one reason why so many people love Facebook and we knew it would be worth bringing these two companies together.

We’re looking forward to working with the Instagram team and to all of the great new experiences we’re going to be able to build together.

Facebook users will be able to subscribe to broadly defined Interest lists, such as sports, or more specific ones, like NFL football. The lists are created by users, and are comprised of public-figure profiles and pages. Facebook says this is a separate product from Friends lists, but users can add friends to an Interest list. Once a user joins an Interest list, Facebook says, the top stories from each Interest group will appear in that users’ news feed.

The social networking giant, which recently filed to go public, said Interest lists would be rolled out to users in the coming weeks.

The blog Social Fresh first reported that Interest lists were in the works after spotting them when Facebook introduced brand-focused Timelines last week.

In some respects, Facebook’s Interest lists are not unlike Twitter Lists, which the microblogging site launched in 2009 as a way for Twitter users to organize their feeds and follow people based on certain criteria, such as “celebrities” or “tech journalists” or “friends.”

But Facebook has already attempted to smarten up its Friends lists. Interest lists are supposed to be more about the organization of all that content cluttering news feeds — especially now that users can “Subscribe” to a person’s feed without having to “Friend” them.

While lists and feeds are essentially a way to organize what you’re seeing on social networks, the end goal is really to keep people using the site, as more and more content is shared through feeds. It’s easy enough to “Unfollow” or “Unfriend” users if their posts become irrelevant, so here’s a way to hide them and push up the stuff that users say they care about.

It could also be seen as a way for Facebook — which is describing Interest lists as a sort of personalized newspaper — to glean more information about a user’s interests without them necessarily having to “Like” something, though Facebook says nothing has changed in terms of how it places ads.

The move comes on the heels of a Pew Internet Research report showing that social network users are increasingly “Unfriending” people and looking to tweak their profiles, due in part to growing concerns about privacy.

This Jimmy Kimmel mocking of Facebook’s requirement that everyone move next week to the social networking site’s Timeline profile is simply hilarious and unmissable.

The “friend your momma” requirement in the video is my favorite:

When? “Over the next few weeks.”

Users get seven days’ warning before their Timelines go live, time enough to find a pretty and personal “cover photo” and change permissions for older content they may no longer wish to share.

This particular Facebook layout change seems to have been less catastrophic than others, in part because the Timeline rollout was delayed, staggered and included the seven-day preview periods. But complaints seem likely to spike once Timeline is no longer an upgrade option but a requirement for everybody.

Just last week, Facebook unleashed 60 new Timeline apps for food, fashion, fitness and travel. Like those for music and other media, the apps automatically post about user activity.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

First, Acer introduced what it is touting as “the world’s thinnest ultrabook” (it will be interesting to see if Acer can still lay claim to that title by week’s end): The Aspire S5, which measures just 15mm at its thickest point. It weighs less than three pounds and comes with a 13.3-inch LCD display screen. It also comes with an interesting “MagicFlip” port panel that’s hidden below the hinge of the laptop. Users can open the hinge to reveal a panel of ports, including HDMI, USB 3.0 and a 20 gigabyte Thunderbolt port.

The Acer Aspire S5 Ultrabook

The Aspire S5 laptop has an Intel Core processor, a solid state drive, extended battery life and a chiclet keyboard. It’s expected to ship in the second quarter of 2012; the expected price is still TBD.

With its Aspire Timeline Ultra laptops, Acer says it is expanding on the Ultrabook it rolled out in September. The Timeline Ultra is available in 14-inch and 15-inch models; the laptops are 20mm thin, boast eight hours of battery life, have solid state and hard disk drive options, as well as HDMI and USB 3.0 ports. They feature an Intel Core processor. So again, not totally different from other Ultrabooks we’ve seen and are expecting to see more of. The Timeline Ultra does, however, have a DVD-Super Multi optical drive, which some Ultrabooks do not have, depending on their thinness and innards. The Aspire Timeline Ultra is expected to ship this quarter.

But Acer’s cloud service offerings looked a lot like a “me-too” to what Apple showed off at WWDC last June. Due to a technical glitch during the press event — and the greatest ironies of tech conferences, aside from dependably terrible cellular and Wi-Fi service, are the technical glitches — we weren’t able to get a good look at Acer’s cloud media service for syncing music and other entertainment files.

Acer’s PicStream (demonstrated via a slide that looked like Apple’s iCloud slide), promises to share photos seamlessly from smartphones to Windows-based PCs and other devices; AcerCloud Docs is designed for syncing and sharing personal and professional documents via the cloud (although it seemed Acer was mainly targeting professionals with this service). Acer stressed that these services will support Windows-based and Android devices.

Lastly, in an odd but not uncommon press conference move, Acer’s Campbell Kan quickly showed off one more tablet and offered just two bits of information about it — it has a quad-core processor and a 1080p display — before concluding the event. Last week, my colleague Ina Fried wrote about Acer’s efforts to remain relevant in the tablet market by introducing a budget-priced, 10-inch, Android-based tablet, the Acer Iconia A200.

MORE CES NEWS:

• Complete coverage
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• Walt Shows Off CES Gadgets for Fox Business News (Video)
• What Kind of Web Video Plans Does Sony Have? (Video)
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Only this time, we learn a little more about what exactly the big guy does all year — as told through Web apps and social media — when he’s not dropping Nintendo DSes and Xboxes down chimneys.

Seems Santa Claus may have gotten his Facebook Timeline before most of you did. And it looks like Rebecca Black may be getting coal for Christmas, if he has a say in the matter.

Last year’s video by the same YouTube user, ExcentricPT, chronicled the story of the Nativity through social media, got more than 10.6 million views and was decidedly funnier. But here’s this year’s video:

However, it didn’t coordinate the Timeline release with the unleashing of the many “Open Graph” applications that developers have been busy building to fill in the story of users’ lives going forward.

Asked when all the Open Graph apps would go live, a Facebook spokesperson said “in the coming weeks.”

Developers reached by AllThingsD seemed to have heard different things from Facebook. Some seemed confident they’d get the nod next week, as soon as Monday. Others said they doubted their apps would be out before January, even though they’re fully ready to go.

Many companies have been working for months on Open Graph apps that have yet to see the light of day. Tens of partners were named in September, but only a handful were allowed to launch, like Spotify and the Washington Post. Many more companies have been working on their own apps in the past three months.

Here’s today’s full Facebook statement on Open Graph timing:

“As we’re rolling out Timeline to everyone on Facebook, developers can build with the Open Graph in beta now. Open Graph apps announced in September at f8 focused on news, music and video have already launched. In the coming weeks, we’ll launch the Open Graph so developers can build a greater variety of apps on Facebook, such as fitness, sports, food, and travel apps.”

And here’s a refresher on the context for how Timeline and Open Graph are tied together:

Users are encouraged to fill in the gaps in their new Timelines, for instance by scanning their baby pictures and other child pics. (By the way, there’s an outside app called ShoeBox from 1000memories to help scan pictures from an iPhone.)

A sampling of content from users’ lives already exists on Facebook — anything they and their friends have posted and tagged on the site. With Timeline, Facebook will display in chronological order every photo, friending and status message each user has posted since joining. The privacy settings will be kept intact, but all this content will be far easier to see than before.

But what about the future of users’ lives? Facebook wants to make Timeline much more full and interesting by including live records of virtually everything its users consume online or track offline. Through its new Open Graph features, outside developers can send automatic activity updates to Facebook.

This could be when a user reads, watches, listens or does anything else for which a developer builds an app.

So a fitness app could send a “run” update of the GPS route each time one of its users goes for a jog, or a kitchen app could send a “cook” update every time a recipe is noted as complete.

That stuff still comes from users approving the app and allowing Facebook to access the information. But once users approve the sharing the first time, it happens “frictionlessly” in the future until they turn it off.

Expect to see a lot more of those options coming soon.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Way back in September, Facebook told the world it was launching two major changes to its service: A revision of user profiles, called Timeline, that would make them more substantive and beautiful records of people’s lives; and “Open Graph” tools for developers to automatically share activity by logged-in Facebook users to their Timelines and friends.

Facebook didn’t give a firm date for the new launches, though it indicated they would be ready soon. “We’re going to roll [Timeline] out widely over the next few weeks as we polish all the edges,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told developers and press attendees in his keynote at f8 on Sept. 22.

But we’re already in December, and those tools have yet to arrive. Why the delay?

“We wanted to let developers build on the platform and to give users more time to get used to the idea of change coming,” a Facebook spokeswoman told AllThingsD, noting that Facebook has been criticized in the past for rolling out products in a hurry. Would she offer a launch date, or even an estimate? Nope.

Developers told AllThingsD that they are eager and ready to launch their Open Graph tools, but that Facebook keeps pushing its dates back. In recent developer communications, Facebook’s promises to launch “before the end of the year” have segued to January, the developers said.

Developers also said they’re worried that Facebook has told them it will likely run a staged rollout, where all users might not receive access at the same time, and where users would have seven days to review their Timeline before publishing it.

Those various states of deployment could be a chafe for app makers to support simultaneously, and could potentially confuse users.

At f8 in September, Zuckerberg had promised that Facebook would soon be filled with a cornucopia of verbs — like “watch,” “listen,” “read,” “cook,” “run,” “throw sheep,” etc. — building on the more static “people,” “places,” “things” and other nouns the site had supported in the past.

He said users could look forward to automatically sharing and collecting records of their culinary and athletic adventures through social cooking and social running apps, for example. Facebook also named a list of developers who had already agreed to create Open Graph applications, including Blockbuster, Flipboard and Mashable.

But only a chosen few — including Spotify, Rdio, the Guardian, the Washington Post and Netflix (though the social version of Netflix is not available in the U.S. yet) — got to launch in September; to my knowledge, no other partners or any other developers have since been allowed to release their “frictionless sharing” apps to the masses.

Meanwhile, more than a million Facebook users are already trying Timeline through a preview version for developers.

Months later, it seems rather odd that some users have an entirely different Facebook aesthetic. Personally, as a user with many connections in the tech industry who have activated their Timelines, when I happen on an older-style profile, with no glossy cover photo, the layout feels dated.

Here are some of the reasons Facebook, developers and conspiracy theorists gave for the delays:

• From the Facebook camp, we hear of efforts to rewrite Timeline to make it faster, to sync up mobile versions, and to fully ensure the product is ready. There’s also some chatter of internal conflict over the Timeline concept.
• Based on my own observations, early response to beta versions of the new features has been mixed. The new real-time Ticker, built to show Open Graph activity and every other action taken on Facebook as a sidebar on the site’s main page, was initially unpopular with many users. Anecdotally, I’ve seen very few Timeline beta users scan in their baby photos to tell the backstory of their lives. And new automated sharing features — like Spotify and especially the social news reader apps — can be annoying.
• There are also some external factors. A small company called Timelines, with trademarks on its brand, sued Facebook right after f8. A judge denied Timelines a temporary restraining order against Facebook, but said he would reconsider if Facebook opens Timeline to a larger audience. As of Oct. 8, 1.3 million people were using the Timeline beta, and tens of thousands were signing up per day, according to court documents. Also, Facebook recently agreed to settle with the FTC over privacy complaints. While the settlement specifically prohibits Facebook from retroactively changing any user privacy settings, it’s not as explicit about how Facebook must introduce privacy features for new products. Given that Facebook is likely to go public soon, people at the company are probably especially interested in surviving a major launch with as little privacy backlash as possible.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Timeline, which is a strikingly divergent redesign of user profile pages, is due “in the coming weeks,” Facebook has said, though people registered as Facebook developers can already try it.

As of last week, Timeline was already being used by 1.1 million people, with 100,000 to 200,000 added per day, according to Lessin’s testimony in the Timelines.com trademark case.

Though Facebook often redesigns its site rather drastically, Timeline is the biggest visual change the company has made so far. The words Lessin used to describe the product are also different; multiple times he brought up the concept of pride.

“Our whole goal here is to help you be proud of your story,” Lessin said. Inspiring pride is an unusually strong and lofty objective for a service that has long called itself a utility.

But two things are inevitable about any Facebook redesign: Many users are likely to strongly dislike it, at least at first; and privacy advocates will protest that it brings personal information into a new light.

Lessin responded to those concerns in our chat, which has been lightly edited and reproduced below:

AllThingsD: So Facebook had the profile, and then it had the wall, but now those two are gone and we’re getting the Timeline. Why?

Sam Lessin: The profile has always been meant to be how you express yourself and the wall was a way to interact. This is the next evolution. While they serve the same functions, Timeline looks very different. But it’s an evolution, not a revolution.

How do you expect people to react to Timeline when they see it on their own Facebook accounts? What features will jump out?

Going down the page, I think people will be excited about having a place to be expressive with the cover photo. It’s not necessarily a groundbreaking feature, but it’s an important one. I also found it to be a pretty emotional experience the first time Timeline was turned on, where you had the ability to look at this content where in the back of your head you always knew was there, but there was no way to see it or access it reasonably. That expressive power is, I think, something that people are going to latch onto.

Obviously the curation controls are pretty powerful, and then other stuff like the map, for instance, it’s a really interesting way to see your own life and to see other people’s lives. For the first time we’re offering a lot of information, which is fascinating, both from applications — what did I listen to the most last month, what articles did I read — plus your own content. We’re offering a new cut that people haven’t seen before.

Do you expect users’ behavior on Facebook to change? Do you expect people to spend more time on their own profile or surfing other people’s profiles?

There’s a lot more to look at on your profile. Historically you kind of knew what was on your profile — it was the job you listed and the last five things you posted. It wasn’t that compelling of an experience. I don’t think there’s going to be any fundamental huge shift, but we’re giving a dimensionality that hasn’t existed before.

In my initial experiences with Timeline, it’s a bit confusing at first because the sidebar navigation scheme has gone away. It feels very different from the rest of Facebook or the Facebook I was used to, and it almost feels like you’re developing off in a different dimension and when I go back to my news feed I’m in a different place.

We want Timeline to feel like your own place. It’s not like we’re off in left field on everything, but there’s no question that it looks and feels pretty different than a lot of the interface. The whole goal with that was to make this feel like it’s yours. We want you to be proud of yourself and tell your story to the right people how you want to tell that story. So yeah, it’s certainly a change, and I think any change is always going to be disorienting. You’re going to remember to click there for friends, instead of the same place you clicked the last 10,000 times. But I also think that’s part of evolving the product.

I’m sure you’ve thought about how to avoid completely disconcerting people when you roll out Timeline. Are you going to let people switch back and forth between the old and the new?

Initially people will be opting in, they’ll be making a choice that this is the interface they want to use. And then once they’ve done that we have this seven-day curation concept [before you publish your Timeline so other people can see it]. Our whole goal here is to help you be proud of your story, so giving people that ability to understand what this is, and play with it themselves, remove things and change privacy, and star the right things.

When is this coming out? Why hasn’t it launched yet — what are you still working on?

We’re rolling this out to developers first, and there’s a lot to interact with and understand. Applications are a huge part of your story.

It might be hard to anticipate, but how do you think people will use Timeline as a private tool versus a public tool?

I think that’s a fascinating question. I, for instance, use my Timeline for private things all the time, as a journal. It’s not necessarily something that I think millions of people will do on day one, but I think it’s a powerful concept. My fiancee certainly sees a very different version of my Timeline than you would, or than someone I don’t know would, and I think that’s great, because it means that you’re telling your story in context to the audience you want.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

One of the quotes I always keep pinned to the side of my computer monitor is by my favorite writer, Joan Didion, from her terrific essay, “On Keeping a Notebook”:

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.

Yesterday, Facebook took Didion’s elegant and poignant concept about memories a little too literally (and, of course, nerdily) with its introduction of Timeline, which the social networking giant is calling “The Story of Your Life.”

Oh dear. (And it hopefully will not include the part about that fantastically dysfunctional break-up in a ratty hotel room by the sea.)

Moving on!

You could look at this new offering from Facebook in a lot of ways, from a new super-sized version of its existing profiles to a digital scrapbook of memories to a geek version of a daily planner.

As Liz Gannes wrote today in a cogent analysis of Timeline:

“On one end, Facebook’s platform update will channel every little thing people do around the Web in real time. Meanwhile, the new timelines in user profiles are an acknowledgment and glorification of the past.”

All true, of course, but to my mind the whole idea of a life on display in pixels like some never-ending comic book — with photos and text and video and smiley faces (and frowns, too!) — is, well, more than a little creepy.

It’s not Facebook’s fault at all, because it is just doing better what it already does, born from its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s central notion that being able to share everything online is the sacred goal.

It’s always been his mantra and the young and decidedly visionary entrepreneur visibly bounced around the stage of Facebook’s f8 developers conference yesterday at the idea of it.

His Timeline had a lot about his longtime girlfriend and his dog, Beast. Has there ever been a more over-sharing canine? I think not!

(Actually, as longtime privacy activist Lori Fena tweeted to me today: “Internet Anthropology: 90’s Internet — Nobody knows you’re a dog. 2011 FB Timeline — Everyone knows you’re a dog.”)

But what struck me the most was a video Zuckerberg showed about Timeline, which depicted the life of a (fictional?) Facebook employee named Andy Sparks, from his birth on August 14, 1974 onward.

Maybe it was just me, but as it proceeded through Andy’s awkward teens to his wedding to his own kids and the years flipped by, I got a sinking feeling that it would not stop until we ended up with a crepe-lined profile page and a digital tombstone.

Here lies Andy — if you have any questions about his entire life, please back-click!

Thankfully, the video stopped at middle-age (Andy would be 37 years old now), but like I said: Creepy!

Then again, it also might be a bad idea to digitize everything in sight in the first place, well beyond such concerns, as Maura Johnston concluded in a smart essay about Timeline:

I think there’s something to be said about the idea of personality development over time that makes me quite uneasy about Facebook’s exuberance over being able to chronicle one’s whole life on the service. What does that do to the notion of memory, the fuzziness of which can have helpful functions at times? … And I feel like so many of the innovations involving technology and persona being put forth right now are being fashioned by people with myopic “everything is great right now and will be that way forever” outlooks, and that they don’t really have any sense of what life beyond their VC-funded Silicon Valley privileged existences might be like.

In other words, who we were may not be, in the end, who we really are.

Or perhaps instead, it is what Didion so eloquently wrote:

“Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.”

Well, we’ll see — but, until then, here’s the Timeline video and, below it, Didion’s must-read essay:

didion

Kicking off its f8 developer conference on Thursday, Facebook unveiled a series of changes to users’ main profile pages with a new view, dubbed “The Timeline.” In addition, Facebook will now let people do actions beyond just “liking” something. Users, as expected, will be able to show they have read a particular book or seen a particular movie.

Wearing jeans and a gray T-shirt, CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed off the new view, which allows users to go back in time and see the most important moments of their life, as well as apps and other things that are important to a person.

“It’s how you can tell the whole story of your life in a single page,” Zuckerberg said, showing his Timeline, which included a baby photo and a photo of him as a young kid wearing a pink tie and suspenders.

The Timeline view can also be seen with just photos or even on a map. Apps can plug specifically into the timeline. In many ways, the timeline hearkens back to the early days of Facebook when most apps added boxes with interesting features to a user’s profile page.

Among the sample apps that Zuckerberg showed were ones that let users add meals they have cooked or runs they have taken.

The new feature also allows a user to do more customization, starting with a giant “cover photo” similar to About.me, plus the ability to highlight major events that users want featured on their timeline.

“You have complete control over your timeline,” Zuckerberg said, noting that users can choose both what appears on their timeline as well as who can see it, such as everyone, or just friends.

Zuckerberg’s keynote is just getting started. Click here for AllThingsD’s live blog.

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