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:

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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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