Posted March 3, 2013 by Faisal Hashmi in Web & Social

Facebook Testing Cleaner, Redesigned Timeline

facebook timeline

When Facebook revamped the Facebook Wall into Timeline, there were a lot of people vocally against the change and rightfully so - it was a great idea but nowhere close to being perfected. Looks like Facebook is on track to perfect it now, since they're testing a redesign of the service with a select number of users.

Mashable has the details of one particular user in New Zealand who's a part of the testing. Let's get some context to it. Here is what the current Timeline looks like:

Here is the new design that Facebook is testing out:

As you can see, one of the biggest changes is that Facebook has gotten rid of the images under every category to make for a more cleaner and minimalistic look more reminiscent of old Facebook. It's a nice idea, but it was also nice seeing previews of each category as an image so I'm not sure if it was worth the cleanliness.

The other very welcome change is how they seem to have ordered the timeline into a less haphazard manner, and now applications as well as 'about' data for a profile goes to the left while status updates go to the right. It's a much cleaner and ordered way to do it and there's no doubt that the Timeline should have been like this from the start.

Also interesting is the renewed focus on Notes, which was buried deep earlier even though it is a very cool microblogging feature on Facebook that could very well compete with Tumblr if handled right:

Of course, this is a test so the final result could be drastically different depending on feedback. The change could even not happen at all, if things turn that way.

But what are your thoughts?