How To Get Facebook’s Timeline Without The Wait

Yesterday Facebook announced the new profile, timeline, but the beta version doesn’t won’t come out until at least the end of this month, if not later, and you have to sign up for it in advance — but, there’s a way to activate it right now, without the wait.

Facebook gives developers early access to timeline so they can develop applications for it. However, you don’t really have to be a real developer, just pretend to be one! Here’s how.

Step 1: Start Facebook’s Developer Application

Facebook has a page, a group and an application called Developer — you want to click on the app, which you can find here.

If you’ve never used this app before, you’ll need to allow it to access your basic information, the same way you would when launching anything else for the first time on Facebook.



After you’ve installed the Developer tool, click on “create a new app,” a button that appears in the top right corner of the screen.

Step Two: Make Up A Name

Developer asks you to provide some information about this app you just clicked the create button for.

A pop-up asks you to input a display name and a namespace, and two of them can’t be exactly the same. It’s simplest to type in your full name for the first field and then in the second area, type it in without any spaces between words.

Then a security popup window pops up, asking you to type in the letters you see.

Step Three: Launch Open Graph

Within the left-hand column, click on the words “open graph.”

Fill out two different verbs. You can use “get profile” or choose whatever you want.

Now you’re almost done.

After a few minutes, your profile will display a notification across the top suggesting you try timeline.

Click “get it now” and start playing with your timeline.

Notice the upgrade is irreversible, so don’t shoot the messenger if you don’t like it.

Until the beta version of timeline becomes available to non-developers — Facebook says this will happen on September 30 — only people who’ve upgraded their profiles to timelines will be able to see your timeline.

Readers, have you upgraded your profile to timeline yet? If so, did you do anything creative with your cover photo? Please share your experiences in the comments section.

Guest writer Eti Suruzon is vice president of planning and media at Blink.