Facebook Timelines Leapfrog Google+ With History of You

Forrester Technology analyst Sean Corcoran said Timelines is an important feature for interactive marketers to target users with goods and services, calling it "word of mouth on steroids." This means changes in targeting users with ads based on new types of behavioral data.

User's content

He added that user engagement data will evolve to provide more detail about a user's content and other tastes over several years. That provides a larger target for social ads, which eMarketer said will help Facebook rack up $3.8 billion in ad sales this year, with a projected $5.8 billion in ad earnings in 2012.

"Our primary business model and it always will be, is advertising," Dan Rose, vice president of platforms and partnerships for Facebook, told Wired. "Our platform makes Facebook more interesting so people spend more time on it, because I'm learning about my friends and I'm sharing things about myself and I'm discovering new things. And it as well makes it possible for us to put an ad in front of you that's likely to be interesting to you."

Dated is one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is that users who are uneasy about or even despise Timelines could shift more of their attention to Google+, whose asymmetric Circles sharing construct resembles Twitter even as the network enables status post, photo and video sharing the way Facebook has done for years.