beautiful bytes – Do you have Timeline yet?

Facebook Timeline rolled out globally

After last week’s news that Timeline was becoming available in certain areas of the world, Facebook announced on their blog that the new feature has now been rolled out to all users. Do you have Timeline yet? Like it or loathe it?

It is worth noting that Facebook have stated that Timeline is still unavailable for brands. While they have never confirmed nor denied that brand pages will get the Timeline treatment, it is widely expected that we will eventually see new layouts soon.

Brand pages gain privacy features

In other Facebook news, brand pages now have the ability to communicate with users privately. This informative post from we are social outlines how the new feature will work.

The most notable addition though, is the ability to private message users from their comments on the brand’s wall.

The opinion around the office is that brands will need to be careful when using this feature, especially if the message is in reply to negative user comments.

This new feature seems to bring further relevance to last week’s beautiful bytes where we looked into whether social media has affected brand’s decision making (for better or for worse) when dealing with negative situations.

Twitter Overhaul

This week saw Twitter overhaul many of it’s product offerings. Profile pages gained a new page header containing vital statistics and the right hand sidebar became the left hand sidebar. Redesigned Android and iOS apps were also released.

An improved system for embedding tweets into web pages has also been implemented.

This will be really useful for displaying individual tweets without going through the arduous task of screen-shotting, uploading and adding an image to a post or page.

The most significant change however seems to be a consolidation of Twitter’s functionality and simplified navigation.

Twitter has traditionally been organically developed by it’s users. For example, hashtags were never an original feature on Twitter, but users started using them to organise conversations. Now, ‘#Discover’ is a dedicated menu item to help users find content they’re interested in.

More next week for the last beautiful bytes of 2011!

Ash