I don’t use Facebook.

Yeah, I have an account and yes I’ve used my account to sign up for other services I do use, but I’ve not used it on a daily or weekly basis in a couple years. 

So I was intrigued when a friend walked into my office last week to show off the new profiles and timelines they were rolling out. It was fascinating to see a patchwork of status updates, images and comments all tied together in one seamless scrolling timeline. As this user’s history scrolled by from last week to last year I was seeing an emotional connection build as memories began surfacing and past stories were told.

Then we hit 1997 and things started to get weird.

Suddenly dates that preceded Facebook’s founding started showing up in the timeline. A picture this users friend had taken and tagged them in was pinned to a date that didn’t exist in the service only hours ago. When we looked to see if the image could be deleted, there was no option to do so. Edit and Hide, no Delete.

Then we started looking at the various types of structured updates available- venues, places, dates, friends and I broke my arm. Wait. What? I broke my arm? As we dug in we found many more of these very structured, clean and fast pre-populated status updates available. Moving? There’s an update for that too.

As I absorbed the new messaging around Facebook as the place to tell the stories of our lives I couldn’t help but be reminded of a post Fred wrote when Google launched their Facebook killer. In it, Fred surfaced a question he had when looking at why Google was requiring use of “real names” as a condition of Google+:

It begs the question of whom Google built this service for? You or them. And the answer to why you need to use your real name in the service is because they need you to. Well at least we got that out there and can deal with it.

I had the same feeling looking at the new Facebook- for whom were these new features built? 

Does all of this new structure make my experience more engaging? Or does the added structure make my experience easier to index? Does the connection to my past posts inspire me to add more chapters of my life’s story? Or does it remind me of how much of my personal information Facebook owns to make me rethink leaving for other service? Is Facebook really interested in helping me tell the story of my own life? Or are they more interested in having me help them tell the story of my life to their app developers, partners and advertisers?

These are questions I’m going to be spending more time thinking about.

PS- as part of this reassessment I visited the application settings in my Profile. It was eye opening to see just how many services have access to my data. I’ve done a pretty thorough purging of them now. You may want to do the same.