After months of slow, gradual rollout, Facebook Timeline is now available to all users.

The Timeline is a radical redesign of Facebook‘s user profile pages, introduced at Facebook’s F8 conference in September. Instead of merely listing your interests and personal info, the Timeline shows a detailed overview of your life on Facebook, with the ability to check out what you’ve been out to at a particular point in time.

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Timeline comes with a new tool called the Activity Log, which enables you to finely tune what appears on your Timeline; you can “promote” a post to featured status, you can hide it from the Timeline or delete it altogether.

Like all major Facebook redesigns, Timeline was greeted with a fair share of criticism. Some users were concerned about Facebook’s request that users add even more personal info, as well as the fact that Timeline makes this info easily accessible, which could lead to identity theft.

The good news is that Facebook is implementing a seven day grace period, where you can review anything that appears on the timeline and decide whether you want anyone to see it. However, once you upgrade to Timeline, that new profile will “go live” at the end of the seven-day review period.

As of today, Timeline will also be available on Android devices as well as the mobile version of Facebook –m.facebook.com.

To enable Timeline, go to this page and click on “Get Timeline.” To find out more about Facebook Timeline, check our in-depth guide.

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The infographic below offers a helpful primer for how to best structure searches using advanced operators to more quickly and accurately drill down to the information you want. This is by no means an exhaustive list of search operators and advanced techniques, but it’s a good start that will help set you on the path to becoming a Google master.

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Interestingly, Timeline is not yet live for everyone but an early preview is available for developers. Since I know a thing or two about code, I am going to help you try Timeline on your Facebook account even if you are not a developer. Simply, follow the steps:

1. Open this link https://developers.facebook.com/apps and click on +Create New App
2. Add the App display name and namespace, this can be any piece of text.
3. On the next page, you will see the App ID and Secret and other details.
4. Click on Open Graph on the left sidebar of this page.
5. Simply define what your dummy app is capable of, like ‘People can read a book’ and click Get Started.
6. In the next page, Action Types, scroll down and simply click Save Changes and Next
7. Next, Time Aggregrations, scroll down and click Save and Finish.

Voila, you just created a dummy Facebook app with Open Graph. Now visit yourprofile page and Facebook will give you the option to switch to Timeline view don’t forget to thank us.

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We've been using Google Plus all week and we can already foresee wasting a huge portion of our lives on it until we're forcibly herded into the next social networking breakthrough. The one stumble we had was dividing our friends up into Google Plus's suggested "circles" of family, friends, and coworkers. We believe life isn't lived by drawing such lines in the sand, so we came up with our own set of 21 suggested circles for dividing up your friends on Google Plus. We'll continue adding to this list, so tell us in the comments which ones we missed.

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Click on the graphic below for an enlarged view:

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Without a doubt, a positive online brand experience creates loyal customers. As several studies have discovered, the majority of consumers who engage with a brand in the digital space – whether by participating in a contest or by ‘liking’ a brand on Facebook – tend to not only purchase the products, but also make recommendations to their friends and family. 

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Click on the graphic below for an enlarged view:

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World Wide Web is growing at rapid pace. On average, more than a billion new pages are added to it every day. To give you an idea of how big world wide web is, our Infographic 60 Seconds will cover some really interesting facts about websites that we use on day-to-day basis

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Infographic by- Shanghai Web Designers

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Did you know that the average Facebook user will change their profile photo 18 times this year? That’s three times as often as in 2006. Check out these interesting stats about Facebook profile photos!

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Pixable has put together a pretty informative infographic that details some interesting statistics about Facebook user behavior as it applies to their profile photos. Check out the stats compiled from the company’s more than 500,000 Facebook users below.

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Just a few years ago, Twitter never existed. It’s strange to take something that’s so widely used today and picture what life was like before it. It got me thinking, what would the world be like today if we never had Twitter?

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This infographic from Hubspot gives us 10 possibilities of how things might be different.

Click on the graphic below for an enlarged view:

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Page loading time is obviously an important part of any website’s user experience. And many times we’ll let it slide to accommodate better aesthetic design, new nifty functionality or to add more content to web pages. Unfortunately, website visitors tend to care more about speed than all the bells and whistles we want to add to our websites. Additionally, page loading time is becoming a more important factor when it comes to search engine rankings.

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Click on the graphic below for an enlarged view:

Click here to download a .pdf version of this infographic.

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From a good night kiss to being your biggest supporter, it sometimes feels like your mom can do anything. But what is the true value of your mother? This graphic, directly inspired by Gary Vaynerchuk, examines the ROI of your MOM.

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Click on the graphic below for an enlarged view:

Flowtown - Social Media Marketing Application

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A recent infographic, created in collaboration by OneForty and Kissmetrics, dives into the world of Social Media Monitoring tools (SMM), showing how users feel about their current tools and which tools are preferred over others.

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Click on the graphic below for an enlarged view:

Flowtown - Social Media Marketing Application

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In celebration of Earth Day, (yes it’s technically an international holiday), the folks at Geekaphone produced this sweet infographic charting the eco-friendliness of Apple’s iPhone. Hmmm… less than 10% of iPhones are recycled? No bueno. Check out Ecosquid if you need an easy spot to donate your old 3G.

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Can you believe that the first published website is already 20 years old? Web design has come a long way since the first website was published by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991. This infographic is a peek at the evolutionary tale of web design, which is ironically still in its infant stages. Enjoy the infographic below and let your imagination wander. You might find yourself asking, “Where will web design be in the next 20 years?”

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View an enlarged version of this Infographic »

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The sales funnel is a tried-and-true model to better understand how strangers become friends and friends become customers. Here’s a view of where social media fits in the sales funnel: 

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Click on the graphic below for an enlarged view:

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This week, the Horn Group sent to Readwriteweb an infographic that shows the vendors in what it calls the Cloud Computing Stratosphere. The group created the infographic to help give its clients some perspective on the market. They sought out Forrester Research for context and guidance.

 

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The infographic looks at the cloud according to four strata:

• Communications and Social Applications
• Software as a Service
• Platform as a Service
• Infrastructure as a Service

There are some companies missing. For instance, Salesforce.com is absent but its Chatter service is included.

But generally it does a fairly decent job of showing the overall cloud world. How would you critique this infographic? Does it do a decent job of showing the general, cloud computing marketplace?

 

 

 

 

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Sharing links on Facebook is one of the primary ways people use the social network. Instead of just showing the full URL, Facebook will pull data from the linked page to display a title, description, image, and domain name.

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This Real Estate is extremely valuable and optimizing it can mean the difference between a few clicks and a few hundred. If someone shares a link to your content on Facebook, will other users know what your site is about? Are you doing enough to get a Facebook user to click through? Think of this shared link as an opportunity to drive a potential customer to your site.

Lately we did some experimenting with the Moontoast Distributed Store and how a shared link to a store appears on Facebook. By using Facebook's Open Graph protocol, we were able to dictate how the store looks when shared to Facebook. Breaking the shared link down into its components, we tinkered with things like image size, calls-to-action, and different forms of copy. What did we find? Athlon Sports' Custom Covers campaign is a great example of a successful shared link:

The Four Elements of a Shared Link

Title

The title of the linked page (or store in this case). Facebook pulls this from the "og:title" tag on the shared page. Instead of titling the store something generic, Athlon Sports used the title as a call to action to increase clicks to the store.

Description

A description of the linked page. Facebook pulls this from the "og:description" tag on the shared page. Athlon Sports used the description as a way to get potential customers interested in the product - "Passionate about college football? Learn how to get Vanderbilt Commodores on the cover of America's #1 Sports Preview magazine!"

Image

An image pulled from the linked page's "og:image" tag. The shared image is the first thing that will grab a Facebook user's attention, so finding the right type of image is crucial to success. Since the Moontoast Distributed Store can be opened inside the Facebook News Feed by clicking the PLAY button, Athlon Sports used an image of the promoted school's cover with a call-to-action to help potential customers know where to click.

Domain Name

The domain where the linked page resides. This is automatically generated by Facebook based on the shared link's URL and lets users know what site they are visiting when clicking a link.

What We've Learned

Compared to previous Distributed Stores that had default shared images and messages, we saw click-throughs increase 75-100% across all Moontoast client stores when shared to a Facebook Fan Page. Needless to say, giving our clients the ability to customize the title, message, and image specifically for sharing to their Facebook Fan Pages made a huge impact and drove even more qualified leads to their stores.

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First stop on the social media strategy -  Facebook

There is a lot more to a social media strategy than Facebook. But it's nearly always the first consideration and for good reason. That's where the audience is. It has by far the majority market share of the social media activity on the web.

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Global stats on top social sites in March 2011:

• Facebook 71%
• Stumble Upon 16%
• Twitter 4%

UK stats on top social sites in March 2011:

• Facebook 63%
• Stumble Upon 18%
• Twitter 8%

USA stats on top social sites in March 2011:

• Facebook 64%
• Stumble Upon 26%
• Twitter 3%

Source: Statcounter Global stats.

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Rather than presenting them in a list, chronologically, or as a mindmap, creative researchers in London have shown what 24 hours of tweets looks like in a motion infographic. They focused on geographically mapping tweets and retweets around London, and condense a 24 hour time period into a three minute video. Watching this video gave me the uncanny feeling that Twitter was something alive and organic. What do you think?

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Researchers from the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London are usually focused on transportation modeling and urban sustainability, but they turned their extensive mapping expertise to Twitter this week.

24 Hour London Twitter Traffic is a three minute motion infographic that shows when and where tweets originate around London, England. It looks at a 24 hour time period and uses data from UrbanTick and Steven Gray.

The video displays a black and grey map of London with a small clock in the top right corner. As time goes by, you’ll notice original tweets appearing as red dots around the map, and retweets as yellow lines dashing from the point of origin to the location of the retweeter.

The speed at which information moves these days is something we all talk about, but really seeing it in a way that makes sense in a snapshot is rare. This slick motion infographic shows us just how active people really are on Twitter, how much they interact, and where tweets are most common. Check it out below.

London Tweets 24h from Anders Johansson on Vimeo.

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With the popularity of the Ultimate HTML5 Cheatsheet we thought we would create one for WordPress. If you create or edit themes at all you definitely want to check this out. Without further delay, we present to you the Ultimate WordPress Cheatsheet. Enjoy!

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Click on the graphic below for an enlarged view:

Ultimate WordPress Cheatsheat by Tech King

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Are you wondering how to visually optimize the new Facebook page layout?

As of March 10, 2011, it became official—the new Facebook page layout was applied to all fan pages. Now that the dust has settled, bugs addressed and some tweaks made, admins can now focus their attention on making the most of what Facebook has given them, which is a LOT of screen real estate!

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Essentially, the new page layout gives over two-thirds of the available screen space to brands (see the red boxes in the image below), with Facebook reserving only its narrow blue band at the top and the right column for its own content.

This new layout greatly expands the branding possibilities for businesses. Now you can create a Facebook presence that’s more fully branded and unified than was possible in the old layout. Before, the only opportunities for visual branding were the profile picture and custom tabs.

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