The upgrade feature, which resembles an illustrated business card as well as contains your friends’ job title, a thumbnail gallery of mutual friends along with buttons for messaging and seeing how you have your friends categorized, is the latest visual change on the world’s largest social network of almost 1 billion users.
It offers members an improved visual summary of their acquaintances, and is only available to those users who have activated their Timeline.
Image Credit: (TheNextWeb)
These pop-up boxes of information are called hovercards and as soon as a user hovers over a name on their News Feed a mini-Timeline shows their profile picture, cover photo, a job description, mutual friends, and even gives you the ability to add them as a friend (or assign them a group) and initiate a private message, and even “unfriend” them right from the hovercard pop-ups, simplifying different processes that would require additional clicks to perform.
However, this current hover card upgrade appears to apply to both Facebook users and Pages, which replaces an older design that is much smaller and shows the same information excluding cover photos and jobs, but users who have not yet set up their timeline still display the older design.
In fact, the tweak to the profile picture resembles almost exactly the Facebook business cards sold by Moo.com, which enabled Facebook users to create their own business cards by pulling data from their Facebook profile or Pages. The company uses the Timeline and user’s information as the template to generate the business cards.
Two years back, the social media powerhouse rolled out the new pop-ups in the Interest section of a user’s profile, linking more favorite books, activities and movies and their corresponding Facebook Pages. Since then, the hovercards have been updated frequently and now display mutual friends and where your Facebook friends are working.
Generally, Facebook usually tests new features on smaller pockets of users before unfurling them on its entire base of 900 million users, so it is unclear if this is a test or has been fully implemented.
On the other hand, the social media humongous thrives on connecting people (think advertising and more interactions) and it hopes that the new tweak assists it in doing that.
So, does this move silently compels all users to accept the Timeline — seeing how well it can be used in other areas of the site? Probably not. But you can not deny that this is a nice little update from Facebook, and just one more way that the company is emphasizing the Timeline as your personal identity.