Facebook Timeline is already cinematic — a whooshing biographical column of your entire life, writ enormous. So turning it into a movie is the next natural step. Too bad Facebook’s directing debut makes you look so dull.
The process is simple: hand over your privacy rights to TimelineMovieMaker.com and then let it scrape your profile for photos, movies, check-ins and other Facebook errata. These chunks and sewn wonderfully into a moving fabric of your life — the production values are really pretty terrific.
But what are you actually seeing? If you use custom privacy settings on any of your uploads, not very much. In my case, I’ve restricted all of my old university albums to people I went to university with — a pretty reasonable privacy move, I think, and a fairly common one. This prevented the movie from incorporating all of my photo albums except one. It also managed to use only one photo I was tagged in by someone else. The resulting film, “A Glimpse of Sam Biddle”, is a compilation of my stupid, grainy iPhone uploads and one album of crappy BBQ pics I took several summers ago. What a life I’ve had!
If the app can get beyond the simplest privacy settings — I’ll give you permission! — it’ll be incredible. Self indulgent and incredibly vain, yes, but incredible. And it’ll make you feel great about yourself! What else is Facebook for? [Timeline Movie Maker]