14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook's been making quite a fuss over the new Timeline for pages and, while the worst is still to come, it seems that it managed to at least get some big pages to work with the new design.
Bands and artists is one thing, but even US president Barack Obama has enabled the timeline for his page and, for once, it actually looks like it's been thought out. Once again, the idea behind the timeline, a very visual story, is highlighted by Obama's page.
One of the nice touches is that it starts out with his birth certificate, posted on the day of his birth. Well, it's actually a picture of a mug with his birth certificate on it, but it still counts.
The page goes through his early years relatively quickly, but then really begins to pile up once he started his first presidential campaign, in 2007. After that it's full of videos, photos and stories.
The Timeline design may not have gotten much love, but, then again, few of Facebook's changes do. But people grew to like it or at least accept it. The same will probably be true for Facebook pages.
The important thing to note is that, while a lot of people may hate Facebook changes, the social network has been remarkably adept at changing, especially for a company worth around $100 billion, €74.4 billion.
It's not afraid to change any of its core features as the Timeline clearly shows. But also important is that, most of the time, these changes are actually for the better. What's more, they're not obvious and they raise a lot of criticism at first.
The Timeline is the perfect example. People didn't like it because they didn't understand it and because it wasn't like their old profile pages. Slowly, people started to realize its unique strength of being able to tell the story of a regular person, or a US president for that matter, in a way that other people are actually going to want to read it.