The Facebook Timeline Is Almost Here, in New Zealand First

Facebook takes its time when rolling out new features. With 800 million users, who complain loudly about any change, perhaps that's to be expected.

At this year's f8 conference, Facebook debuted the latest evolution of its profile page, the Facebook Timeline. It was quite a big upgrade and the concept behind it is an interesting one.

But like most things Facebook announces, few people actually got to see it in action, just developers and faux-developers.

Now Facebook is finally rolling out the feature to regular users, starting with New Zealand. It's still a test, albeit a country-wide one. If things go smoothly, you can expect Facebook to start making the Timeline available to users around the world.

"We announced Timeline in September and made it available to developers building apps on our platform. Since then, over a million people have signed up for the developer beta to access Timeline," Facebook explained.

"The feedback we've received so far has been invaluable. Starting today, we are making Timeline more widely available as we measure speed and other types of performance. We'll begin by making it available to people in New Zealand and then roll it out more broadly in the near future," it announced.

The Timeline, as the name implies, aims to present the story of your life, at least as much of it as it is on Facebook. You can add photos and events from the moment you were born to the present day. Facebook hopes that the Timeline will become part scrapbook, part journal, part autobiography.

It has a good chance of becoming one of the most popular features on the site, the presentation is well thought out and invites people to fill it in. Understandably, Facebook has spent a lot of time on it and is rolling it out very slowly. But it looks like it's going to be well received by users.