The other night I began telling my roommate about my Cover Photo on Facebook’s new Timeline (which I got early through the developers’ page) and was met with a blank stare…

She’s pretty up on things, so I was surprised that she hadn’t heard about the major changes to FB, which are set to launch publicly some time this month (exact date is unknown due to FB’s ongoing court battle with Timelines.com).

Many people may have thought the recent changes to the News Feed and the addition of the real-time “ticker” that began rolling out on September 20 were the extent to what FB had in store for us–but indeed, our friends at FB have much bigger plans up their sleeves!

The new Timeline is a completely redesigned FB page, which chronologically lists all your activity on FB since you joined and even allows you to fill in your life story all the way from birth (in case you have a massive amount of idle time on your hands).

At first I was annoyed when I heard the news.  Who is FB to dredge up the past several years of my life and put it on display for all to see?  But after perusing my new Timeline, I was pleased with my relatively conservative ways on FB–basically, I’ve never posted anything I wouldn’t want my friends, family, “not-my-real-friends,” and colleagues to see, anyway!

However, if perhaps you were an over-sharer and one point and have since tightened up your sharing habits, you might have a bit of cleanup to do once you get the new Timeline!

I really like the Cover Photo, which is a combination of your profile photo and a larger cover photo.  This allows increased creativity and options for personalizing your page. Mashable recently highlighted some really cool Covers Photos.

And here’s mine!

If you’re an early adopter, you’ll have to do it by hand, but I’m sure that within a couple weeks of the public launch there will be tons of Cover Photo generators to do the work for you.

Overall, I think the new Timeline is pretty cool.  It has a neat, sleek layout and it was actually quite nice to take a stroll down memory lane.  It is a little more complicated, but you do have control over the privacy settings for just about every individual post (and settings from your current page do not change with the new Timeline).

What are your thoughts?  Does anyone have the new Timeline?  If so, feel free to share a link to your Cover Photo in the comments section.

kisses, Olisa