Facebook’s new Timeline feature, that up until now has been an optional switch for its more than 800 million users, will very shortly become compulsory for everyone using the social networking platform. Facebook began the forced switch in some regions yesterday, and will continue to do so in the next few weeks.

Timeline, which is a scrapbook of your whole life on Facebook, is a lot more revealing than the traditional profile page you are used to.

It would have taken hours for someone to stalk your profile in the past, but as some of you may already know from having seen or used Timeline, this will no longer be the case.

Once you are prompted with a message that tells you you’ll have seven days before the mandatory switch takes place, you should start getting used to the changes.

The Associated Press has compiled a list you can go through that will help you make your Timeline look more like you want it to:

You can change privacy settings on individual items to control who has access. You might want to narrow embarrassing photos to your closest friends or delete some posts completely, or at least hide them so only you can see them.

You can change the date on a post. For example, if you took a few months to post photos from a trip to Portugal, you can move them to appear with other posts from the time you took that trip. You can also add where you were, retroactively using a location feature that Facebook hadn’t offered until recently.

For major events in your life, you can click on a star to feature them more prominently. You can hide the posts you’d rather not showcase.

Besides your traditional profile photo — your headshot — you can add what Facebook calls a cover photo. It’s the image that will splash across the top and can be a dog, a hobby or anything else that reflects who you are. Keep in mind the dimensions are more like a movie screen than a traditional photo, so a close-up portrait of your face won’t work well, but one of you lying horizontally will. But you don’t even have to be in it.

You can add things before you joined Facebook, back to when you were born. Life events can include when you broke your arm and whom you were with then, or when you spoke your first word or got a tattoo. You can add photos from childhood or high school as well.

If you feel overwhelmed with so many posts to go through, start with your older ones. Those are the ones you’d need to be most careful about because you had reason to believe only a few friends would see them.

Click on Activity Log to see all of your posts at a glance and make changes to them one by one. Open Facebook in a new browser tab first, though. That way, you can have one tab for the log and the other for the main Timeline.

Choice – you don’t really have it, but at least there are a few things you can do to protect your privacy a little more if you’d like.

[Source: Yahoo]