From Technology Review
10 Emerging Technologies: Facebook's Timeline
By Ted Greenwald
Facebook recently introduced its Timeline interface to its 850 million monthly active users. The interface is designed to make it easy to navigate much of the immense amount of information that the social network has gathered about each of its users—and to prompt them to add and share even more in a way that's easy to analyze....
Timeline is making real the concept of the "permanent record," in the form of a computer-assisted autobiography—a searchable multimedia diary of our lives that hovers in the cloud. But it may also have an unintended effect of calling users' attention to just how much Facebook knows about them. Normally, "when people share information about themselves, they see a snapshot," says Deirdre Mulligan, a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information. "When people see Timeline, they become aware that all those bits and pieces are more than the sum of the parts. They suddenly understand the bigness of their own data."