Now that most of us have Facebook’s new Timeline feature, we’re able to add a bunch of things from our past to the social network. The question I’ve been asking is “why would I want to do that?”. I may have just gotten a pretty good answer to that.

In a joint project by Facebook and design firm Definition6, TimelineMovieMaker will turn all of the posts on your Timeline into a really eye-catching movie, complete with special effects and music.

All you have to do is give the app access to your Facebook account, and it will handle the rest. As you’re waiting for your movie to be created, you’ll see certain pictures from your Timeline that will be included:

It only takes a few minutes to create your movie and once it’s done, you can watch it and choose different music or replace photos afterwards:

Once you’re happy with your Timeline movie, you can share it to Facebook and let friends have a look:

While this is a dead-simple app that explains itself, it is interesting that this is an official Facebook product. Of course, with the word “Timeline” in the domain name, it would have to be. Whether Definition6 did all of the heavy creative lifting or not, this has to be one of the uses of Timeline Facebook thought about when it first released the product.

I’ll admit that seeing all of my Facebook activity in video form makes me want to fill in some of the gaps to make for a better “movie”. While my life isn’t interesting enough to hit the big screen, I do get a kick out of seeing it on the small one.

The bummer is that you can’t export or embed the video to share elsewhere, but hopefully that will be added since I’d love to put this up on YouTube.

➤ TimelineMovieMaker

A few months ago, we introduced you to an app from photo hosting site 1000memories called “ShoeBox“. The app lets you scan old photos and place them into digital “shoeboxes” for sharing or to keep safe for the future.

The whimsical nature of the app which lets you describe old photos, letters, postcards, or anything you have sitting around the house, fits in perfectly with Facebook’s goal for its Timeline product. Adding things from your past to fill in the gaps.

1000memories has announced its official Timeline integration, which lets you add the original date a specific item or photo was taken, and it will share it to Facebook with that date intact. Here’s what 1000memories co-founder Rudy Adler had to say about the integration:

It’s easy to forget that Facebook is only 7 years old, which means most of our photos and memories are not online yet. The introduction of Facebook Timeline has made clear the huge gaps in our life stories – most obviously from our birth dates to the invention of Facebook in 2004. We built ShoeBox to finally get these photos from our past out of the closet and online where they can be enjoyed by everyone.

The two seem to be a match made in heaven.

Sharing photos on your Timeline

When you have the ShoeBox app for iOS fired up, simply scan something and set a date on it. When you choose to share, simply choose Facebook. All of the information will transfer over to your Timeline and your photos will be placed accordingly.

Once you’ve shared a photo, it will show up on the right-hand side of your Facebook profile and will fill in your Timeline. Depending on how far your photos go back in time, your Timeline will start looking more complete. This is an absolute genius use of the Facebook feature, and one that will help people fill in missing years on the site.

While I’ve personally not seen a lot of my friends on Facebook fill in past years on their Timeline, having an app that is all about bringing back photos from your past should kickstart that activity. As Facebook starts approving new applications and actions for Open Graph, we’ll be seeing more apps taking advantage of everything that Timeline has to offer.

➤ ShoeBox for iOS

Thanks to a company called SpinningHat, you can forever memorialize your favorite profile design forever. Or as many times as you plan on taking a shower.

The “Social Shower Curtain” will set you back $23, but it’s worth it for the “lol” factor. Plus, it’s retro already, isn’t it?

The unauthorized Facebook shower curtain comes complete with a transparent window where your profile picture would normally go. If someone dares to enter the bathroom during your morning splash-session, they’ll be able to check your status in real-time. The shower curtain is set to ship in February.

Let’s hope Facebook doesn’t plan on suing like Apple is over the Steve Jobs doll.

➤ Social Shower Curtain

According to a report from Inside Facebook, people who really hate Timeline and are looking for ways to get rid of it are becoming victims of scams on the social network.

By searching for “remove Timeline” or “disable Timeline” on Facebook, you’ll find a slew of groups and pages promising step by step instructions on how to disable the new Facebook feature that just recently went live for everyone. There’s only one problem, disabling Timeline is impossible, and users who follow these instructions are being scammed.

Some of the scams don’t appear to be harmful, simply dropping you on a landing page asking you to like a few pages and in return your Timeline will magically disappear. Mind you, it seems like an obvious scam to those who are tech savvy, but for people who really don’t understand how Facebook works and don’t like the new feature, they’ll apparently try anything:

While liking things won’t do any technical damage, some scams are asking people to download and install extensions for their browser, and who knows what type of harm that could cause. For example, 14,068 people have liked this page that automatically prompts you to download an extension as soon as you do so:

There’s no way to know how successful these scams have been or what they do to users exactly, but it’s best to keep an eye out for these types of things if one of your friends shares it with you. There’s no way to disable Timeline once you’ve said yes to trying it out, and it will be mandatory in the coming weeks. If you find one of these pages, you can simply click “Report page” in the bottom right hand side to help Facebook get rid of this junk.

If you really despise Facebook, you could always go back to using IE7, which is no longer supported by Facebook.

It appears that Facebook has stopped supporting Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 browser, according to our friends at The Sociable.

While this isn’t surprising since the browser is five years old, it is a bit of a hack for those who would rather not use Facebook’s Timeline feature to browse the site. It’s not perfect though, since along with dropping Timeline, IE7 also screws up the page a bit with extra white space:

Once you get past all of that though, it’s the same old Facebook that we’ve used for years:

Even if you’re not a PC user, you can spoof your browser’s user agent to emulate IE7 quite easily with Safari.

Just go to Preferences > Advanced > Show Develop Menu In Bar

Once you do that, just click Develop and User Agent like so:

You can even clean up that ugly white space by installing a script called F.B. Purity. That’s a lot of work to get around having to see a Timeline on Facebook, but if you’re geeky, have the time and want the challenge, go for it!

With the introduction of Timeline on Facebook, a new feature that allows you to add a “cover” photo has become all the rage. It’s very MySpace like, in that you can spruce up your profile with pictures of yourself, something you saw on a trip, or perhaps something artistic.

Right now, covers and profile photos are the only way to personalize the visual tone of your Facebook profile, as the rest of the site is pretty uniform looking.

Naturally, people want to impress you with their cover photos, so one site decided to dedicate all of its efforts to finding the most visually stunning pieces of art that you can add to your own Facebook profile. The site is called Fookcover, and it has hand-picks the best of the best.

Cover me

Fookcover has sorted these beautiful cover photos into categories like nature, abstract, urban, and cute. You can even submit your own by emailing them to hello@fookcover.com. But be sure to send them a photo with the following dimensions; 851×315 .PNG format.

These are a few of my favorites:

Unfortunately, you have to add the cover photo yourself by downloading it, but that’s probably because Facebook hasn’t exposed the cover photo feature to developers yet. You can however click “Add cover” to share your favorites from Fookcover on your wall.

I imagine that a slew of these sites will pop up, but it looks like the folks behind this one have a keen eye for design and art, and I’m enjoying what they’ve carefully curated so far. I like how the site gives full attribution to the creators, a nice tough to create a budding community around this idea. Hopefully Facebook never allows animated GIFs to be added to your profile though, or it will turn into MySpace. Yikes.

➤ Fookcover

Read the latest Facebook news every day at TNW Facebook.

With Facebook’s Timeline coming “Soon”, according to project managers at Facebook, there will be many new things for you to take notice of once it becomes live.

We know that there are all new things to “worry” about when it comes to who sees what on your Facebook profile, but the company will be asking you to worry about what you’re sharing even more by asking you to add “Life Events” to the service.

What are those suggested life events you ask?

They’re broken up into five sections: Work and Education, Family and Relationships, Living, Health and Wellness, and Milestones and Experiences. At first glance, this seems pretty reasonable considering that Facebook is made up of your friends and family for the most part.

After a deeper dive, some of the optional life events seem like over sharing, and shows off Facebook’s insatiable taste for more and more of your data.

Got a piercing or Tattoo?

Facebook seems to be primed to be the digital scrapbook of your entire life with its Timeline product. The layout is quite gorgeous, and even though it can be a bit confusing on why it displays the data that it does and where, it’s definitely a visual upgrade from your current profile.

However, in the status box, you’ll notice the “Life Event” tab.

Adding life events are completely optional of course, but it will be very interesting to see how many people actually dig down deep in their past and share everything that has ever happened to them.

For example, one health and wellness life event asks you to enter any past illnesses.

Even though I very publicly fought cancer myself, I was a bit hesitant to enter this information in. I’m not worried about who sees it as much as I’m interested in how the company will use it. Could they use the data to advertise to me directly? Absolutely. But what else is possible with all of that information about one person. Only Facebook truly knows.

Here are some of the more interesting suggested life events for you to enter into the site’s database:

Some of them seem rather benign and silly like “Got a Piercing or Tattoo”, but then you’ll notice ones like “Changed Beliefs” and “Lost a loved one” which seem creepy to even ask for. I personally would not enter that information into anyones database, let alone a social network’s.

Yes, there are privacy controls on each other, and you could enter these things for only your eyes to see, but it’s kind of disturbing to think that people might be adding these very personal events into a public platform.

There are “Other” options along the bottom of each section, which lets you add your own life event in any category. At what point is this to be considered over sharing, though? Do we really want Facebook to be the one place that has all of our information, past and present? Adding all of this past activity could take hours upon hours, and I’m wondering how many will actually dedicate the time to this.

Will you add the dates of ended relationships, piercing additions, instruments you learned to play, and more once Timeline is released to everyone? Tell us in the comments.

In preparation for the public release of its new feature “Timeline”, Facebook now lets you post photos to your Timeline with a past date.

That makes complete sense, since the idea of having a Facebook Timeline is to backlog everything you’ve experienced, turning your Facebook profile into a digital scrapbook for safe-keeping.

When you open a photo now, you are shown a “change date” option in the bottom right, which lets set any date for a photo.

Up until now, all photos on Facebook were given a timestamp based on when you uploaded it to the service.

This is definitely one of the things the company is putting in place as final touches on the full release of the Timeline feature for all 800 plus million of its users.

The question I have about Facebook‘s Timeline is will people actually spend a lot of time uploading photos and making posts about prior life experiences and meticulously date them? It sounds like a lot of work to me, and it will be interesting to watch how the adoption grows once its fully released.

One lucky Twitter user has noticed some changes to his Twitter stream.

According to his post, Twitter has made more changes to its Timeline feature, which is your stream of incoming tweets.

Tweets will now expand when you click them, rather than show up on the right hand side. I personally found that experience to be hit or miss, with full conversations sometimes not showing up at all.

In my opinion, Twitter’s number one issue has been quickly finding any contextual information around a tweet or a reply. Will these changes make things better?

Media will show up in an expanded Timeline tweet view, making it easier to check out a photo or video attached to a tweet quickly and resuming your Twitter scanning:

Along with these tweaks, retweet and profile information have received new treatments, also staying close to the Twitter Timeline, rather than on the right hand side.

Here is a video showcasing the changes:

These changes make context around a tweet readily available without taking you away from your Timeline. These are smart changes by Twitter; hopefully the company will roll it out to the whole user base soon. With more focus on letting users consume more with doing less, Twitter will keep users engaged.

Today at the Web 2.0 Summit, Facebook’s CTO Bret Taylor discussed Facebook, Google+, and sharing content on the web. Taylor was even asked if data portability would bring you the ability to share content between the two services.

Taylor said:

Data portability is interesting. it’s very easy in the context of single user services

It seems as if data portability for a massively connected social network like Facebook is a much bigger problem to solve, if it’s a problem for most mainstream users at all.

Friendfeed, Bret Taylor’s company that was purchased by Facebook two years ago, has very similar properties to Google+. Bret Taylor shared that Google+ has benefited from the hard work Friendfeed did proving that sharing content in real-time is important.

Taylor also discussed Facebook’s philosophy on privacy, saying the company was “very proud” of its privacy controls. Facebook has come under scrutiny on its privacy controls, even from former Facebook President Sean Parker. Taylor says that Facebook’s privacy controls “aren’t perfect”, but they continue to work on letting users control what they share and where they share it.

The Facebook CTO feels that if Facebook makes its privacy controls even more granular, users will end up sharing more on the service. Basically, if users have control, they will feel more comfortable.

On Facebook Timeline, Bret Taylor says the product was a huge departure from the design philosophy of Facebook, focusing on sharing the users lives and interests. He shares that Timeline should be public in “the next few weeks”. This is what we keep hearing from Facebook, as we’ve never been given an exact date of release for Timeline.

Regarding power users and Sean Parker’s remarks, Bret Taylor shared:

I actually think in many ways, the original group of people who used Facebook, people in college and right out of college, the people where their social lives was their focus point, is the power users on Facebook, we spend a lot of time focusing on them, it’s why your mom uses Facebook.

Facebook spends a lot of time turning its Newsfeed feature to build engagement and bring better content to users. Bret Taylor said he was “really bullish” on the Newsfeed product.

It is very interesting to hear Bret Taylor speak highly of Google+’s strategy, and reveals that Facebook will more than likely be heading in a similar direction with its Newsfeed product.

Keep up with the latest news about Google+ and other Google products at TNW Google.