The new social network

On Sept. 30, Facebook will reach an unprecedented level of creepiness when it releases Timeline.

Due to be officially introduced to all users within the next two weeks, the Timeline is an online scrapbook that shows a user’s life story via a visual, scrolling timeline. Everything from status updates, photos, recent friendships, to preset events such as your birth, graduation and first job is displayed. The timeline begins at your birth—there is a box that allows you to post pictures and information—and continues through your most recent activity.

Facebook in its earliest form started out by showing all the information you would share with someone within the first five minutes of meeting.  It was then expanded to all the information in a fifteen minute conversation. Now it has progressed to encompass your entire life story, incorporating all aspects of your life from what you had for dinner to what page you are on in the book you are reading.

Gone is the simple layout of the wall with its organized posts and pictures.  Taking its place is a screen filled with large dialogue boxes and pictures branching off from the central timeline—a line marked with dates.

Displayed and stretched across the top of a user's profile is a customizable "cover"—a large photo that the user chooses. A sidebar on the right of every profile displays each year since the user has had Facebook. When a year is clicked, the viewer is taken to the part of the timeline for that year, displaying the decidedly most important stories of that year, including all of the friends that the user made that year, all the photos that they were tagged in and the friends that were in the most photos with them.

"I think it's really creepy how you can stalk people from every year," said junior Monica Gaines. "It's organized in a way where people don't have much privacy, and it is easier to get more information out of somebody than it is now. I don't like it."

The Friends page is different now as well, with friends whom a user interacts with most displayed at the top and those with the least number of interactions at the bottom. This is expands the current system in which the 10 friends who view your profile the most show up on the left side.

Facebook users who had the Timeline before Sunday afternoon were also able to view friends who had un-friended them during certain years, but Facebook has deleted the bug. Stalkers can, however, find joy by dragging this link to your Bookmark bar. Just open your Facebook, and a list will appear with a ranked order of who you stalk most. The numbers that appear next to each name come directly from Facebook's algorithm.

Follow Mashtable's instructions to download the Timeline early:

1. Go to this link.
2. Click "Allow."
3. Click "create new app."
4. Name it anything, and check "I agree."
5. Click "Open Graph" on the left side.
6. Type in anything (it doesn't matter what you type), and click "Get Started."
7. Scroll down and click "Save Changes and Next."
8. Wait a minute on this screen, and then go to your Facebook homepage, where you'll find an invitation to enable Timeline.

Maybe in a few months everyone will wonder at the primitiveness of the current Facebook, or maybe they will all flee to Google+ and Twitter. But in the meantime, get ready to stalk and be stalked.