Unlike Twitter, Facebook posts have a tendency to stick around over time. Because each post is added to your timeline, friends may see it next time they visit your profile. This contrasts with Twitter, built around fast-paced live-action updates that quickly become buried under new tweets.
As CNET reports, Facebook appears to be making an attempt to bring Twitter’s spontaneity to its own service. It is testing a new checkbox labelled “Hide From Your Timeline” with some users that appears in the status update box at the top of your timeline, next to the privacy selector and Post button.
Posting a status with the checkbox enabled will push it into the news feed without also adding it to your timeline. The post will effectively disappear over time, obtainable in the future only via search results and scrolling down through the news feed.
Facebook told Engadget that the feature is based on requests from users. “The Timeline on your profile is a great place to see a comprehensive history of your Facebook posts,” the company said to the news site.
“We’ve heard feedback that sometimes, you may want to share a post with friends and family via News Feed and not have that post be displayed on your Timeline. The ability to hide a post from your Timeline already exists, and today we’re testing a feature that would make it even easier to control where your posts live by giving you the option to publish a post only to News Feed and not to your Timeline.”
Facebook already allows you to remove posts from your timeline but only after they’ve already been published. This can be done by clicking the small downwards-pointing arrow at the top-right of posts and clicking “Hide From Timeline.” The new feature makes it possible to prevent a specific status ever reaching the timeline though, letting you ask your friends questions or post things you’d rather not retain forever without cluttering your timeline.
This ability could allow Facebook to attract the kind of user who currently frequents Twitter. The live status updates, news alerts and instantaneous thoughts that often appear on Twitter don’t fit so well into Facebook’s current model of saving everything for future reference.
As always with features in development, there’s no guarantee Facebook will ever launch this feature and it could be abandoned in the future. As it’s already reached public testing, it looks like the company is serious about the checkbox though, becoming a better rival to Twitter through a single click.
