Everyone’s known that timeline would eventually become the official profile on Facebook and yet the news of the imminent switch has tensions rising.

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Many have documented the widespread use of Facebook while intoxicated, but those who make New Year’s resolutions to sober up go uncounted.

A submenu in timeline provides a convenient way to commemorate recovery from addiction,especially when the privacy settings are rigged to limit visibility to likeminded folks.

The international organization with the greatest success in helping people overcome addictions has “a tradition of anonymity at the level of press, radio and film.”

That policy has had individual members of Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-step recovery groups guessing about what to do with respect to Facebook, especially given the widespread misunderstanding of the privacy settings on the site.

These organizations refrain from maintaining official pages and groups on the site, but individual members tend to post status updates about recovery milestones.

Now the new timeline profile includes a simple way to mark one’s sobriety date, which recovering alcoholics and addicts often regard as a second birthday.

Privacy settings can limit visibility of this life event so as to respect anonymity — while Facebook’s smart lists don’t detect whether friends are members of 12-step organizations, one can manually configure a list consisting of contacts from just such a group.

To post a sobriety date, head for the area where you input a status update on a profile page, then click on the third link to the right, labeled “life event.”

That pulls down a menu from which you’ll want to select “health and wellness.”

Clicking on that pulls out another set of options to the right.

They include “overcame an illness” and “quit a habit,” which could function as ways to commemorate a recovery milestone if you don’t mind having either of those labels.

To use your own words to describe your milestone, such as “sobriety date,”  click on “other life event.”

The set of fields that come up include date, name of the event, location and “who with.”

Most importantly, the bottom right-hand corner of the data entry area includes a link for limiting visibility to friends or a subset of friends — here’s where you can opt to have only people in recovery be able to see the milestone.

Some Facebook users have the new timeline profile, and some don’t. Some want it, while others want no part of it, as you can tell from comments all over the Internet, including on timeline-related stories here.
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Before timeline went live, it was actually possible to undo an upgrade to this advanced profile: Uninstalling the Developer application from your Facebook account would remove the timeline. But now all of this has changed.

A spokesperson for Facebook explained in an email to us:

Once you click “Get Timeline,” you will have seven days to review everything that appears on your timeline before anyone else can see it.

If you choose, you can publish your timeline right away. If you decide to wait, your timeline will go live automatically after seven days. Your timeline will replace your profile.

Eventually everyone on Facebook will be rolled over to timeline.

Less technologically inclined users of Facebook have said they find timeline overwhelming. Complaints have followed nearly every upgrade the social network has ever made, and eventually people have simmered down after getting used to the changes.

But the timeline’s changes present a bigger learning curve than anything the site has ever done before, so let’s see what Facebook does to educate people about the advanced profile.

Readers, what are your friends saying about the timeline?

If you are searching for a job, whether you already have one or not, and you’ve got a profile on Facebook,you should make sure that all unprofessional photos and language are removed or blocked from the public. If you don’t,  potential employers may choose not to interview you because of inappropriate content.

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“Four billion pieces of content are shared daily on Facebook,” said Vadim Lavrusik, journalist program manager at the social network, who spoke at the Changing Media Landscape panel at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism last night.

“Not to say all of those [who post content] are journalists, but everyone participates in some shape or form,” said Lavrusik, who, differing from his fellow panelists requested that his Facebook profile be included in his bio in place of his Twitter handle.

As of right now, he has 28,693 subscribers to his profile. The page he runs, Facebook + Journalists, has 146,724 fans, while 1,337 people are “talking about” the destination as of this writing.

Part of Lavrusik’s job is to think of how journalists specifically can use Facebook better, and he’s been focused on building out the educational resources available to journalists on the network to help them enhance their reporting, share better, and find information clustered around events more easily.

“We really think partnerships, such as the one we have with Yahoo, have really personalized the news experience. The New York Times also now has Facebook features. You can log in and see what your friends share.”

Friends, he said, can be a pretty good filter (though some may call this narrowing).

Lavrusik is particularly pumped about Timeline, a new feature that hasn’t launched yet—it was supposed to go live late September. Currently, only Facebook developers can access it.

“It will launch when it’s ready,” said Lavrusik. “I’m really excited about Timeline.”

He’s also boiling over about the subscribe button, another project the 2010 graduate of Columbia’s School of Journalism has been toiling away at. “It’s the biggest thing I’ve worked on in the past few months,” he said.

The new feature will help Facebook users keep up with content better, he said.

It will allow anyone to subscribe to your public updates. This way, people who you may not know personally and/or consider friends, such as readers and sources, can read your updates without becoming a friend in your network. These contacts will be subscribers.

Then, Facebook users will be able to designate information they post as public (available to subscribers) or available only to those who are friends in their network.

This may further help users limit the availability of the information they post so that only certain people in their network can see it – without limiting the size of their overall network.

“We don’t give enough credit on how far people have come, how much progress has been made,” said Lavrusik. “Five years ago I used to help my mom log into her Wells Fargo account to check her account.” She now has her very own Facebook account, he said, that she created on her own.

“The fastest-growing demographic on Facebook is 55-plus,” he adds.

This is information he and colleagues study closely.

“The majority of news organizations don’t think enough about analytics and audience research,” said Lavrusik, “How the demographics break down.”

His gain, perhaps. The average Facebook user now posts double the amount of content they did this time last year, and that doubling has occurred each of the last two years, said Lavrusik.

Facebook actually has made changes based on how it’s seen users operate on its network.

For example, he said, in response to noticing that a community blog had started using the notes feature to post blog posts, they considered how they might improve the formatting of long-form content and decided to increase the number of characters available to use in a status update from 420 to 5,000 characters.

“If content is king,” said Lavrusik, “then distribution is queen.”

Does volume equate quality? Yes, he thinks so.

A shocking 91 percent of recruiters screen applicants via social networks, according to online reputation manager Reppler.

Reppler includes that data point in an infographic (scroll down to see it) created in time to plug the latest upgrade of the vendor’s reputation monitoring service, which has expanded to include LinkedIn and Twitter in addition to Facebook profiles.

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Congratulations! Facebook users can now share the news of an impending birth. The option to list an expected child, along with due date and name, appears within the family section of their profile.
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The Facebook page of a 16-year-old teen accused of killing her infant has overflowed with either wishes of support or death for the young mom.
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We’ve heard from several readers this week about signs that Facebook might be testing yet another redesign of the home page and possibly the photo viewer.

Facebook routinely updates various features of the site on an ongoing basis, so any limited beta tests of new layouts or designs is simply business as usual for the social network.

Just as routinely, however, users of the site tend to get uppity about profile redesigns in particular, which makes the whole process of redsigning an interesting dance for Facebook.

So we’re curious to know, dear readers, whether you’re seeing any of the signs of a possible redesign on your home page or other features on the site — and do you even want to be seeing them in the first place?

Please share your opinions by participating in our poll below. Plus, we’d love to see the rationale for your vote in the comments section.

You can add your own replies if the choices already listed don’t suit you. While the poll blocks repeat votes, you can select more than one option. Don’t forget to check back to see how everyone else is voting.