A lot of people have a problem with timeline selecting stuff from years past and making it more easily discoverable, or more "in your face".

Those who've recently divorced don't really want to look at their own timeline and see a bunch of stuff with their spouse 2 years ago. Those who have grown in maturity or changed religious/political views don't really want some stupid thing they said 5 years ago to be a mere one screen-length from the top of the page.

I personally am irritated with the "curated" experience. It ties in with sorting wall posts to "top stories" instead of by date. I know there was a discussion last month I want to get back to, but FB has decided it doesn't show up on my timeline or my friend's timeline, because it only gives a selection of posts from that month.

So people actually go searching out and reading others timelines? Seems so foreign to me.

Against my better judgement I've been on Facebook for years and outside of the occasional look back on someone profile to see when their kid was born, got a new job, etc I never leave the newsfeed view.

But, agreed on the horrible reading experience though, the only thing worse is

A | C

B | D

style that academic papers still use.

Edit: the above style is worse when reading on a screen of any sort, on paper fine, but screen inevitably leads to scrolling around and doing quite a bit of context switching

How is that worse? That is only 2 context switches whereas the facebook one requires 4

Websites are generally exceeding the screen space vertically. So when you scroll B and D suddenly have new content.

Although each status update is a discrete element, so it's not as if the dual column layout really matters.

I mean, you're not reading a book-- it's more likely you'll read a status update and then expand and read the comments directly below it rather than reading a large number of statuses in a row.

The news feed is still in a single-column format because you might actually read quite a few in a row of those.

At any rate these extensions seem like an exercise in futility as Facebook will surely completely remove the non-timeline functionality sooner or later.

The thing that gets me is, what's behind that? FB has many many well-paid designers and interface people...how did that flip model come to be? Is that really the best they can do with the resources of Facebook? I'm reminded of Microsoft (yet again)...

My guess is getting people to scan left to right rather than top to bottom increases ad views.

By that token I would think that it's more like "a disjointed reading experience will allow for more cognitive 'slots' in which to place advertising."

I had a phone interview for a engineer position at Facebook, and the interviewer told me that the timeline project began as an internship project that got traction.

As I get older, one of my most peevish interpretations of some companies' development models is "putting their student loans to work."

To reframe that question, who wants to read straight through someone's timeline like it's all a big blog post?