Friday, September 23, 2011

How To Enable Facebook Timeline

Yesterday, Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerburg has announced the new feature of Facebook, which includes archives and timeline that enables users to browse their past contents, photos and statuses. It is one of the site's breakthrough that allows its users to reminisce how great they were a few years back (sarcasm intended).



Fortunately, enabling Timeline a bit early isn’t too difficult — but it’s not at all straight forward, either.

As you all know, enabling Facebook's timeline feature at this point is open graph developers. You, too, can be an open graph developer — even if you’re just looking to dabble.


A few things before enabling this feature to your Facebook account:


  • Expect a LOT of bugs. It would be a pain in the ass and frustrating, unless if you're actually a developer.
  • It's only you who can view your timline (unless if you decide otherwise) but will be seen by the public a few days after.
  • It seems that if you login into Facebook on another machine, Timeline gets disabled automatically on all of your machines. With that said, it seems you can get back to your timeline (but ONLY after following the steps below) by navigating to http://www.facebook.com/YOURUSERNAMEHERE?sk=timeline
  • You’ll need to have a “verified” account for one of the steps, which means you need a credit card or phone number attached to the account.
Are you ready? Now let's tweak your Facebook!



Here's how to do it:


1. Log into Facebook

2. Enable developer mode, if you haven’t already. To do this, type “developer” into the Facebook search box, click the first result (it should be an app made by Facebook with a few hundred thousand users), and add the app.



3. Jump into the developer app (if Facebook doesn’t put you there automatically, it should be in your left-hand tool bar)

4. Create a new app (don’t worry — you wont actually be submitting this for anyone else to see/use). Give your shiny new app any display name and namespace you see fit. Read through and agree to the Platform Privacy agreement. This is the step you need to be verified for.

5. Ensure you’re in your new app’s main settings screen. You should see your app’s name near the top of the page

6. Look for the “Open Graph” header, and click the “Get Started using open graph” link.

Create a test action for your app, like “read” a “book”, or “eat” a “sandwich”


7. This should drop you into an action type configuration page. Change a few of the default settings (I changed the past tense of “read” to “redd” — again, only you can see this unless you try and submit your application to the public directory), and click through all three pages of settings

8. Wait 2-3 minutes

9. Go back to your Facebook homescreen. An invite to try Timeline should be waiting at the top of the page

And you’re done! We’ve seen this work quite a few times now, so it should work without a hitch for just about anyone.

Special thanks to TechCrunch!




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