With the mandatory switchover to Timeline, Facebook is now throwing away the last bit of its roots.
We used to write on someone’s Wall. So what’s a wall anyway? If you’ve been at Facebook long enough, the answer is pretty obvious to you: Why? Of course, you write to the wall of your friend’s dorm room. Facebook was a virtual student directory (a “book” with “faces”) connected to a set of virtual dorm rooms. That’s why you write on people’s walls, why photo albums are photo albums and not something else, and why notes are notes and not blog entries.
So how do you write on someone’s “timeline”? Does it even make sense to speak of writing to a “timeline”, even? Isn’t this too abstract?
Facebook has now cut itself off from all vestiges of its metaphoric past. How then is it different than all other social media sites? If it had started out this way, it would never have gotten this big.