Facebook Timeline Announcement at f8 Conference - New Profile Pages

Mark Zuckerberg revealed that the core of the Facebook experience will be changing. Facebook profiles are being completely re-worked to become what is being called the Facebook timeline; a complete history of all of your updates, photographs and general information. The announcement was made during the keynote presentation at the 2011 Facebook f8 Conference in San Francisco. The new profile pages feature a far more customisable design, with the ability to modify the header with a full-width image which is different to the profile picture. The timeline is essentially one page which lists all of the information and updates from that individual. People can completely customise the items which appear on the timeline, meaning the new profiles are far more expressive than what the current format allows. A demo timeline has already been made available on the Facebook website. Recognising that people would not want to sit and scroll through 1000's of bits of data from many years worth of updates, Facebook has included the ability to skip to different parts of the timeline quickly using the date navigation to the right. The timeline will also feature individual "views" for each type of content, so photos or status updates can be shown exclusively. Apps are also an integral part of the new timeline. Although apps have been a long-time feature on Facebook, the timeline now provides people the ability to add a particular app to your timeline - providing more flexibility in the way you can express yourself via your Facebook profile. The new apps will also cover the ability to listen to music directly on Facebook, while also sharing it with friends. Similarly, you will be able to watch movies and read books. The buzz surrounding this years Facebook f8 Conference has been building for sometime. Yesterday, an article on Mashable sent anticipation through the roof with the blogger speculating that Facebook was about to "enhance everything in your life". And we now see why. The latest announcement comes just two days after modifications were made to the way which the news feed works, with a new "ticker" and top stories introduced to help users find the updates most relevant to them. You can watch live coverage direct from the f8 Conference in San Francisco here.