Plenty of people are still unwrapping their undies after the move to Facebook’s super-graphical Timeline look — and now the company is ready to mix things up again. Check out what your profile might look like soon.
Looking at the profile of TPM’s Carl Franzen, who already has the new Timeline (apparently in beta testing), the design shift is much cleaner. The largest change is moving your name and vital stats (college, workplace, home location, etc) from underneath the cover photo to right on top of it — superimposed in white text. The image boxes that used to display your friends and most recent photo are now collapsed into a plain text rectangle. The entire upper row is squished considerably.
It’s cleaner, but that’s not always a good thing! Our first eyebrow raise is with the cover flow text — what if your picture has a lot of white space? Or what if it’s something more complex than a picture of a cat? White text isn’t legible spread across just any graphic, and this could lead to some serious readability problems. The loss of seeing your most recently tagged photo and a handful of your friends also makes the tip of the Timeline seem a bit more sterile compared to the OG version from last year — and is anyone really creating “Life Events” that would fill out the new Summary tab?
Facebook is probably considering these questions riiiiiight now, and depending on the answers, this overhaul may not ever see light outside of a select few: Franzen says “Facebook declined to specify how many user profiles the new test would involve, as well as whether the new look would eventually be the standard for the website.” [TPM]