Over the next few weeks, every Facebook user will get timeline as Facebook will start requiring people to switch to the new profile format. Users who get timeline will have 7 days to preview what's there now. This gives them a chance to add or hide whatever they want before anyone else sees it.

Introduced last year, timeline is a new kind of profile that lets Facebook users highlight the photos, posts and life events that help them tell their story. Timeline is essentially a scrapbook of users' whole life on Facebook, compared with a snapshot of them today found on Facebook's traditional profile page. Once activated, Timeline replaces the current profile.

Timeline doesn't expose anything that wasn't available for sharing in the past. It just allows people to jump to the older material more quickly.

According to Facebook, users can change privacy settings on individual items to control who has access, change the date on a post or even hide it. In addition, the Activity Log section will show all of the posts at a glance, and users will be able to make changes to them one by one.