Karen Hanna recently informed business analysts about a few things they should know about Facebook Timeline. Hanna writes, “The “old” Facebook profile shows a user’s posts in order from new to old, and information such as photos and videos are organized in a tabular fashion. Timeline is a broader, more visual view of each user, where updates may be highlighted for their importance. Users may also “fill in the blanks” to include significant past events. Users can potentially provide a lot more content, something that is of interest to advertisers and businesses.”

She continues, “Although Facebook is a social networking site, it is also an instance of a semantic web, one that connects one user to another and that discovers relevant new connections and presents its findings. It is a foundation upon which millions of third-party developers and users can add a profile, a business identity, a piece of content, an app, or an advertisement with Facebook as the engine that connects us to all of those bits of information in a meaningful way. The Facebook Timeline feature could potentially be a boon to IT analysts who mine semantic data. The temporal aspect has the potential to make semantic connections more meaningful because it could be a way to track trends, brand loyalty, and demographic influences over time.”

Read more here.

Image: Courtesy Facebook