Facebook Timeline is coming whether you like or not. In the next few weeks, your Facebook profile will be assimilated, giving you seven days to get your house in order before everyone can browse through your virtual history.The seven-day review period. Once upgraded, Facebook users will be able to work through their Timeline and get things ready before it goes public. During the seven-day review period, the Facebook user will be able to publish it at any time. If he or she chooses to wait, it will automatically go live after the week is up.Here are some helpful hints to clean up your profile. 

The Activity Log is the best place to edit a Timeline. Facebook has built a very helpful new page called the Activity Log, which can be accessed from a profile page, that shows every single piece of content Facebook has from a user. Each item can be deleted or tweaked from this page.

‘Hide from Timeline’ 

Is Your Friend Get ready to click “Hide from Timeline” a lot. You can find it under the “Edit or Remove” pencil icon that comes up when you hover your mouse over the top right corner of every Timeline post. Remember, it’s not just embarrassing photos that Timeline unearths — it’s every inappropriate status update you’ve ever posted and every asinine message your old college buddies have ever written on your wall at 3 a.m. 

If you’ve had Facebook for a long time, you’re going to want to spend at least an hour combing through everything in your virtual past and hiding what you don’t want seen. You can also remove or hide posts through your “Activity Log,” which presents everything posted on your profile in a more compact, easy-to-digest form.

Smile! Your Album Covers Are Now Huge

Before, old photo albums hid in an archive — a collection of small thumbnails that only the most committed Facebook stalker would search through. Now it’s all front and center on your Timeline. That means that the photo of you drinking a giant novelty margarita in Las Vegas could now be displayed in unsettling clarity in one of Timeline’s two giant columns.

If you want to keep your photo albums visible,but just want to switch the cover to something a little less embarrassing, click “Change Primary Photo” in the “Edit or Remove” menu.

Cover Photos 

Your cover photo is your chance to make a splash. The most striking feature at the top of the new Facebook profile is the cover photo, which stretches across the page’s width. The Facebook user’s profile photo, which is seen across the site, is now just a small square.

Most are using this opportunity to make the profile photo a simple face shot and have used the cover photo to show something more personal, like a pet or favorite vacation spot.

No new information is being shared.

Yes, Timeline is bringing back a bunch of old posts. But these posts have long been viewable on Facebook. Before, a friend would have had to go to a profile and click again and again for more posts, but would eventually travel back in time.Your privacy settings on old posts will remain.

A post shared four years ago that was set to be viewable to just friends will continue to be viewable to just friends. The only concern here lies in how a user’s definition of friend has changed. A photo or status update that in college that was OK for friends might not be OK for friends now, which might include coworkers.

The Internet Knows Where You Are

Photos and photo albums can now be tagged with locations, which are then displayed neatly on a map. That means if your friend geotags your album “Vacation Time,” all of a sudden instead of just photos from a cabin in the woods, everyone can tell that your August vacation took place near Lake Tahoe.

Now you have to either untag yourself from every geotagged photo or have your friend manually remove the geotag from every photo you’re in. It’s a total pain. Welcome to Timeline.

Violation of Privacy? There’s an App for That

A lot of the apps out there for Timeline are pretty cool, but a few ventures into TMI territory or, at the very least, turn your profile into a kind of corporate billboard. Think carefully before you let a third-party app have permission to automatically add activity to your Timeline. Do you really want everyone to know where and what you’re eating at all times or what products you’re buying online? You can always manage your apps by clicking on “Account Settings” in the very top right pull-down menu on your profile.

Then click “Apps,” and you’ll be presented with a list of all the apps that have access to your Timeline. Remove the ones you don’t like or, under “App activity privacy,” change who can and can’t see the content posted by that app.Remember, you can always remove any individual embarrassing app revelations on your Timeline by clicking “Hide from Timeline.

”When in Doubt, ‘View As …’

On your Facebook Timeline, you should see a little gears icon on the far right. Click on it, and then select the “View As” option. This will let you view your profile as if you were a stranger or let you pick a specific person to see how he or she sees your profile. It’s a handy tool to use when trying to evaluate how well you’ve cleaned up your profile.

Posts can be expanded.

Timeline already tries to guess which of your posts will be the most interesting and it makes those viewable. It can try and guess here by how many likes or comments a post has received. If there is a post that should be expanded and is not — like a new job or college graduation — you can expand it.

For your eyes only. If there is a post in your Timeline that you don’t want to zap completely from Facebook, but don’t want anyone to see, you can change the post’s visibility to “Only Me.”Users can add other life events.

Facebook is hoping that users flesh out their Timeline with information from B.F. (Before Facebook), too. Anything added to the Timeline can now be given a date. So, if a user uploads an old photo from summer camp, he or she can set the date to June 1995 so that it appears chronologically in the Timeline.

There’s no sense in holding out. Facebook Timeline will eventually go live for everyone on Facebook, whether or not the user has taken the time to prune and optimize the Timeline view. It’s best to be proactive and make sure what people will see is what should be seen.