Facebook continues to be the marmite of social networking sites, and non more so than with its latest transformation.

Facebook Timeline
On 22 September Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, announced new partnerships with Spotify, Netflix, the Guardian and other media companies. “The last five years of social networking have been about getting people signed up,” Zuckerberg told Facebook’s f8 conference in San Francisco. “Until recently people weren’t sure how long the phenomenon would
last. Now social networks are a ubiquitous tool used by billions of people around the world to stay connected every day.”
Facebook has in recent months ramped up its attempts to attract and keep its users on the site in the wake of competition from Twitter and a new rival in Google+.
As part of the changes announced on Thursday, Facebook users will be able to automatically share activity such as viewing, listening and reading in a live “ticker” stream,
once they have opted in to the feature. The new stream will be separate from the existing Facebook news feed, although popular items – such as the most frequently played songs among friends – will appear in the column.
“We are making it so you can connect to anything you want. Now you don’t have to like a book, you can just read a book,” Zuckerberg said. “You don’t have to like a movie; you can just watch a movie.”
Facebook unveiled sweeping changes to users’ profile pages, including an online scrapbook, dubbed Timeline, which Zuckerberg said will “help you tell the story of your life”
. Timeline would allow readers to document important moments – such as birth, graduation and marriage – while maintaining “complete control” of privacy settings. Unlike Twitter and Google+, which are heavily focused on exchanging messages with friends, Facebook has become an online destination where people can record their own history. Facebook, which attracted a record 500 million people in just 24 hours, now allows users to watch films, listen to music and read newspapers without leaving the website.
Planet Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg’s ambitions never stagnate. Facebook has become the biggest social network on the planet, where friends and family can keep in touch, and figured out a way to generate advertising money from the time spent on the site. But now he wants to move beyond “like”; he wants us all to “read” and “listen” – to look at stories from magazines and share your music with friends to enjoy.
Facebook wants to be the centre of your web experience. That’s behind the redesign of the wall into a “timeline” – the line of experiences recounted by your friends. Rather than being a simple line, Facebook’s offering the chance to organise it, with the photos and videos.
Music sharing – let friends listen together to songs through free streaming services such as Spotify. “It isn’t trying to block you from listening to songs you haven’t bought; it’s ab
out helping you discover so many songs you end up buying more content than you ever would have otherwise,” Zuckerberg said. His other ambition, obviously, is to be the next Steve Jobs – the pe
rson who makes you pay for music online.
The key is that he wants Facebook to become the de facto authentication mechanism of the web. Perhaps you’re sick of having to remember your login details at every different
website you go to (because it’s wrong to use the same password everywhere; if one site gets hacked then your online identity is compromised): he wants to make it possible for you to log in everywhere using just your Facebook identity, which of course is almost always your “real” identity. (What happens if your Facebook login gets stolen? Ah, that’s a different problem.)
For Google, still the biggest and most widely used search engine (even if it’s not the biggest in Russia or China), Facebook’s changes are yet another example of how s
ocial networking, a trick it has never mastered, still remains out of reach. Despite launching Google+, its own social networking service, to the world earlier this week, it lags behind by about 680 million users.
Facebook, meanwhile, is mutating before our eyes: no longer an evanescent startup, now a giant. MySpace, Bebo, Friends Reunited: they’re the past. Facebook more and more looks like the future. All hail the new Facebook!