If you’re anything like me, when you heard about the new Facebook Timeline your first thought was, “Crap, again?! They change everything as soon as I get used to it!”

Your second thought was,

“OMG what the hell did my friends post on my wall from when we were all in school?”

No need to worry, though.

First of all, if you’ve been mindful of your privacy settings in the past, then you won’t have too much to worry about. All those past privacy settings apply to your old data. You also have the option of going to Privacy Settings and setting all your old items to “Friends” only. If you have custom privacy settings, for example, “Friends excluding coworkers and John Smith” then you might not want to take that step, as it will overwrite all your previous (stricter) settings.

Second, there is a way to see, hide, restrict, or delete every item that could appear on your timeline.

Third, the timeline is pretty easy to navigate. It’s visual (and beautiful, I might add.) It shouldn’t take you long to get used to it.

I’ve highlighted the major features to get you started.

The Basics

This is probably the biggest overhaul of the profile page since Facebook started. There’s a major focus on activity here. If you’ve hooked up Spotify or Netflix to share activity with Facebook, it’ll report what you’re watching or listening to in real time. You can actually pause a song on Spotify from Facebook. There’s much more of this sort of thing to come, as app developers now have the option to add actions and items to the Open Graph. WTF does that mean? Well, it means that if I build an app for you to read my blog on Facebook, it’ll post “So&So is reading Bits of Beauty.” This part could get really awesome or really creepy in the future, depending on the apps you use and the permissions you grant them. Ok, enough of the mind-blowing/creepy app talk and back to the profile changes.

Your basic info, Friends, Likes, and Photos are all neatly displayed in a row below your name and a square profile photo (and your Cover photo if you’ve selected one. More on this later in the post.) Each can be further explored by clicking on them. All your extended profile info, like your quotes and about, are now found on another page.

Here’s what the top portion of your Timeline/Profile looks like to someone else. (I’m using a screenshot of the lovely @sashahalima‘s profile.) The rest, the timeline itself, looks the same all around.

The Publisher bar is now located on your timeline, as the first node. Keep scrolling down and you’ll see random nodes down the timeline, some will be expanded and others you’ll have to hover over to see. Browsing down your timeline, you’ll see some items lumped together under years. So, the majority of your Likes, Friends you made, Music, posts on your Timeline (formerly and still sometimes known as the Wall), and Events from 2009 will appear together. This will also happen if a bunch of people wish you well on your birthday. You can, of course, further explore by clicking and scrolling within each of these boxes. Along the timeline, you’ll also see the option “Show All Stories” pop up when you hover over certain items.

Your Activity Log and Editing the Timeline

Upon switching to the new timeline, the first, most important thing you’ll need to know is where to find the Activity Log. I say this, assuming you want to edit what appears on your Timeline. If you don’t care what shows up on it, then this isn’t important.

While on your profile, look for the View Activity tab. Clicking on this will bring you to your private Activity Log. This is an archive of your life on Facebook, year by year, month by month. You can also further filter this page by clicking on the dropdown tab up in the right corner (which by default is set to “All”) and selecting whatever type of activity you want to look for. Only you can see your entire Activity Log. If you’re having flashbacks to spring break ’06, here is the place you’ll want to browse (and hide) them from. On each activity, there’s a dropdown  on the right where you’ll have the option to Feature, Allow, Hide, Delete, or Report as Spam.

When you Feature an item, it is given similar weight to a Life Event (more on these later), so the activity will span the entire width of your timeline instead of being oriented on the left or right side of it.

If you’re around my age, you likely joined Facebook in 2004. That’s 7 years of activity to sift through! Of course, everything here was already available on your wall, if someone really wanted to get to it. Nothing you previously hid or deleted will appear here, but things you might have forgotten about in the past are MUCH easier to jump to now.

You can hide and delete posts directly from the Timeline page (your profile page), but I find it easier to do from the Activity Log since everything is laid out in list style and there’s so many filter features.

The Big Picture: the Cover & Other Images

What my fellow bloggers will probably love the most is how visual the new timeline is. While Facebook hasn’t caught up to Google+ on the quality and display of photos, it’s leaps and bounds beyond what it was a few months ago. Many have compared it to a personal scrapbook or website. The most noticeable, of course, is the new Cover photo.

Those with awesome photos will love showing it off here. Note that Life Events on the Timeline all have the option of featuring a landscape oriented photo. Yes, you could use portrait (vertically) oriented photo for this, but facebook’s notoriously bad handling of photo resizing will leave you with a pixelated mess. (Unless your photo happened to have been uploaded as high-res. Then you’re safe.) Go ahead and start sifting through your pics now.

Life Events

The timeline begins the year you were born, so what’s between then and whenever you joined Facebook? Well you can fill that in, by adding life events.

On your profile page, where you update your status, you’ll see some new icons: Work and Education; Family and Relationships; Living; Health and Wellness; and, my favorite, Milestones and Experiences. Click on any of these and you’ll be given options like adding when you got a pet, had a child, learned a language, etc.

As you can see in the image above, when you select Learned a Language, it asks you for details including your favorite word and the method you used to learn the language. If there was something special that happened which doesn’t fit into one of these categories, you can select Other Life Event under any of these tabs to add a custom event. You’ll be asked to fill in info about the Event, Location, Who with, When, Story, and to upload/select an image to represent your custom life event.

Here’s an example of a Life Event published in the Timeline.

Odds and Ends

You’ll notice that Facebook chooses certain activities to feature under each year for your timeline. For me, these activities were really odd ones and mostly wall posts by others on my wall, especially in earlier years. Activity is the focus, so the more activity others have with your activities the more weight they carry and more visibility they get. As time goes on and Facebook refines all its new features, I’m sure it will get better. I’ve had some problems with editing privacy for photo albums since the new photo layout has been introduced; a bug that I’m sure will be fixed in a few days. As pointed out by Mashable, there’s an issue with adding an engagement or marriage as a life event and it not automatically changing your relationship status; that you’ll have to do separately, by editing your info. I noticed that even though my status updates were defaulted to be shared with Friends, when I added a Life Event it defaulted to Public. It was simple to change, but I could see where this might annoy some people.

If you don’t want to wait until October 1st to get the new profile, you can follow these instructions to get it early. Browsing through your timeline makes for good times. I found all sorts of gems in my timeline. It’s best with a glass of wine in hand, and perhaps a good friend to laugh with.