It's Facebook Timeline Day! What You Need to Know

Facebook Timeline is finally here. You can wait for a notification asking you to switch, or you can just click here to do it now, but either way, the new profiles are rolling out to all of Facebook’s users starting today. (Note that you won’t be able to see any of your friends’ Timelines until you activate the feature.) What you should know:

• “Set aside some time for Timeline. Especially if you have been actively using Facebook for years. This is going to take a while,” writes Jessica Guynn in the Los Angeles Times. You’ll want to sift through this “obsessive compulsive's digital scrapbook” to figure out which embarrassing status updates and photos from years ago you might want to hide—and which important life events you might want to add. Fortunately, you’ll have seven days to preview the changes and see how your new Timeline looks to others before it becomes your official new look.

• Timeline will summarize application activity, notes Jared Newman in PC World. That means if you’ve integrated Spotify, your friends will see the type of music you like; Nike+ GPS will show friends where you run.
• Don’t worry: Your existing privacy settings will remain intact, and you can still adjust them for individual updates while in Timeline. You can also easily see how your Timeline looks to others by clicking “View As” in the gear menu at the top of Timeline.
• Brand yourself, Amy Porterfield tells the Huffington Post. One specific tip: Your new profile photo will be an image that spans the entire top portion of the page, so get creative with it and design something that will really stand out.
• A word of warning: “For better or worse, the new format is likely to bring back a lot of old memories,” writes Jenna Wortham in the New York Times. “But going forward, it could also make it harder to shed past identities—something that people growing up with Facebook might struggle with as they transition from high school to college, and from there to the working world."

(More Facebook Timeline stories.)