Collection of images with words. The words could be placed together beautifully. The typography could be interesting slash gorgeous. Or maybe the image is just cool.

Enjoy.

(You can finally get your Facebook Timeline now)

It was her first year of college when she joined Facebook in 2005, as can be seen from the beginning of her Timeline. Everything looks like fun, like a university freshman’s life should be; pictures of parties, funky friends, and road trips are all carefully chosen to portray the person she wants to be. “Sara is in BEIRUT BABY!”, reads a status update from June 2005. Her eyes shine with the excitement of the new as she stumbles across a new phase in her existence.

Scroll up the Timeline to go through the next few years. You can see her growing, becoming more serious. There she is studying for a test in what appears to be a library. Here’s a picture with her glasses fogging up as she drinks hot coffee on a cold morning. As we scroll higher through her Timeline, the fun switches from parties to relaxed picnics. “Good luck with your thesis,” writes a friend. There’s now a constant in the images; a young man with tousled brown hair and a smile as big as hers. She’s her tossing her graduation cap.

Scroll up some more. She’s sitting on a desk, and the caption reads, “Sara joins to the workforce :)”. There are pictures of cozy dinners at the houses of friends. A close up of her wearing a tailored suit and carrying a briefcase while she laughs really hard. The constant is still there, becoming even more constant. Suddenly, Sara is dressed in white, smiling joyfully at the constant on their wedding day.

The last picture on her Timeline, as of today: Sara, wearing a warm woolen hat, with her hand resting on a stomach the size of a watermelon. Her friends are congratulating her.

That’s the story of Sara, as told by her Facebook Timeline. So far, at least.

Sara and I went to elementary school together. I haven’t seen or heard from her since we were nine. The truth is, I don’t really know Sara, but I know a lot about Sara. I know that she likes her coffee creamy, and that she has been wearing glasses since 2007. I know that she loves her iPhone, and that her favorite brand is Gap. I know that she’s fun, smart, and honest. I can tell you all the major milestones of her life; when she graduated, when she got married, when she started her first job. I can relate to Sara, a woman I would have never been able to relate to if it wasn’t for Facebook’s power of narration.

Ah, narratives. They have an almost holy aura to them, although they are nothing more than chronology with meaning. Soap operas have narratives, and so do newspapers, powerful brands, and public figures. We communicate information using narratives as a tool, because the receiver will not “get it” otherwise. Narratives simplify complexity, make meaning out of chaos.

As businesses and individuals, we need to start telling more stories. We need to speak in human terms. We need emotions. We need to connect.

And Facebook, oh, holy Facebook, is well aware of that. A site overhaul planned to roll out in October is tapping even deeper into the power of narratives. Your profile will stop being a profile and become your life’s timeline. At the top of the page, where it says News, it will say Stories. You can chose between seeing Top Stories Since My Last Visit or 37 More Recent Stories.

All of these Stories string together in Facebook’s new profile function, Timeline. With Timeline, all of your Facebook posts will flow together in chronological order. Tell the story of your life, Facebook promises in its introductory video, starting with the year you were born. You can share and highlight your most memorable posts, photos and life events on your timeline, narrating your story from beginning, to middle, to now.

The internet is changing the way we tell stories, especially our own. Whether users want their stories to be told remains to be seen, but my gut feeling is that there will be a mad rush to tap into narratives, and not just in the online world. We will start seeing businesses focus more on their brand stories. We will start seeing whole new experiences in technology that revolve around plots. We will have to start using cohesive emotions to engage today’s generation, who come with no attention spans.

Better get that storyteller hat out.

–

Here are some screenshots from my Timeline, my life, my narrative. It’s the story of my life, really. It’s a reflection of what I did, what I do, who I was close to during certain periods. It’s humbling. It’s creepy. It’s retrospective.

I’m turning 27 in 2012.

I was 18 when I started blogging.

Can you believe that?
 

More Hyperlink articles:

It’s Time to Learn How to Surf
It’s Real Time
Start a Blog is NOT a Social Media Strategy
Advertising on the Information Highway
Social is the Word
The iPad Will Change the World
Does the Internet Now Speak Arabic?
Google You: Your Professional Brand Online
Left that Copy
Virtual Goods: A Dollar’s Worth of Pixels
Dial the Web
It’s a Wiki Wiki World
Tis the End of Software as We Know It
Revolution 2.0
Good Web Design is Invisible
How to Use Crowdsourcing to Change Your Business
The Age of Overwhelming Information
The Power of a Like Button
Another Social Google Attempt
A World in the Cloud
His Jobness Steve: A Tribute

This is a hilarious yet absolutely brilliant look at the cliches of Hollywood, compiled by Christophe Courtois. Movie posters are separated according to genre, and it’s when they’re put together that you realize how depressingly brain dead mass culture is.

Don’t think, honey.

Unicolor – The smaller, less known movies

The Red Dress – Romance

The Back – Loneliness of the main actor, often a hero

The Eye – Mostly horror

Animals – If they play an important part in the movies, blue is an important color

Blindfolded – Law and Justice

Tom Cruise – Preferably profile

Text and Faces – Mostly the main actor is courageous and brave

Back to Back – Tough love

A silhouette in front of the ocean – Drama and emotion

Black, White and Fire – Action movies, a lot explosion

Black, White, Red – Action movies, a lot of guns

Blue colors and street images – Mysterious stories (thrillers)

Creative usage of movie elements to create a face

The legs – These movies often contain sex scenes

And my favorite:

Tom Cruise – Preferably profile :)

MIT invented a camera that shoots a freakin’ TRILLION frames per second. You can see the advancing LIGHTWAVES.

How your eye and regular camera would see this tomato:

How the MIT camera sees this tomato:

OH MY GOD.

I can’t close my mouth.

I want that in my eyes. Imagine seeing rainbows every single frickin’ second, bouncing off EVERYTHING.

Wow.

For more details on the project, visit the project website, which amazingly looks like it was created in 1998. 

There, I said it.

Fine, it’s a well-designed typeface.

But it’s cold. It’s plain. It’s BORING.

It’s the king of cliche chic. It’s overused. It has no character. It’s the lazy option.

It’s the Paulo Coelho of design.
Never read a book in your life? That’s okay, you can always say your favorite author is Paulo Coelho,

Know nothing about typography? That’s okay too, you can always say that your favorite typeface is Helvetica.

Stop using Helvetica. Grow a personality.

Here are some snippets from my mother’s AmmanTT talk earlier this year.

For more, visit her website, which as you can see, I’m still working on :)