Facebook Timeline is too awful to be an accident

I'm sure Facebook, just like google and twitter try to find and display only relevant. Nobody is perfect

I think Facebook timeline differs in a fundamental way from, lets say, newspapers.

Newspapers work well with multiple columns because there's no inherent connecting features. Sure a page from the sports section will all have sports related items, but in general all the columns stand by themselves.

Facebook timeline is united by time. As in, what I say at the top of my timeline might be directly related to what I said before, and that might be directly related to what i said before that, and so on. So as humans, we want to read objects in the way they were chronologically presented. But on the new timeline, in order to do this, we have to zig zag from left to right, to left again. This isn't engaging the user just as making me do jumping jacks while I read isn't engaging -- yes it is spicing up my reading experience, but that just forces me to relearn something that is harder than what I was doing originally.

If the timeline was broken up into pieces, I could deal with that. Wall posts on the left, images and polls on the right, etc. Give my eyes some logical way to focus on only a part of my screen. But the exact middle of the screen on Facebook is a dividing line between left and right that presents almost identical information, and I have to form a structure from that.

Taking another example, in movies, it makes sense that the movie makers try to confuse and sex up a movie -- our brains want to be stimulated. But there's a difference between spicing the content of entertainment and spicing up the delivery method that content is offered -- imagine going to the movie and having two videos on the screen at once -- both showing different things. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't be happy.

I found timeline confusing at first, but then I realized if I focus on the line in the middle then reading posts becomes just as orderly as it was before, with the added benefit of greater information density. It also unclutters the left side of the page which was a column before. And also by turning the background blue it gives better contrast to the news/chat panels on the right. About a third of my friends have switched over now, and old profiles just look old. The large banner was a nice touch as well.

That does seem to help, but I still feel it breaks two common usability notions:

1) Lines are used to divide content and guide our eyes to what is important. In this case, we have to travel "across the line" to see the next piece of content which may be related, which breaks common notions.

2) Our mind usually focuses on the largest items on a page and then goes to the smaller details afterwards (Like how magazine article titles are always bigger than the text below it). In this case, after the top photo, my eyes move towards the bigger content boxes than the thin line in the middle.

EDIT: A third one!

3) If we focus on the line, the content to the left of the line becomes slower to read than the content to the right of the line. When we look to the left of the line, our eyes have to travel across the entire box to get to the start of the status. When our eyes travel to the right, the status starts a lot closer (due to text being written from left to right)

Here's an example:

Its a great day to be a programmer | I can't believe I got this job!

If you read this left to right, its fairly to read. But if you start in the middle at the line and want to read the left comment, your eyes have to go all the way to the left to get to the beginning, then come all the way back to where they were in the middle at the line. When you read the comment to the right, the text starts immediately.

I agree, they've pretty much broken every single UI convention by having information chronologically separated in between columns. As a society, we're used to following down a column because of the breaks, like a newspaper. For some stupid reason, Facebook has broken this convention and made posts go back and forth between the column break which is idiotic.

What I despise is the lack of privacy, because if I tag a photo with a friend's name, all their friends can see it, regardless of my privacy settings which forces me to no longer tag my friends.

I basically have stopped using Facebook except for reading up on the newsfeed.