Milestones allow you to create specific historical events in your life and enter the date, location, explanatory text and pictures. This is just the sort of fun sharing feature Facebook wants to use to get more information about users so it’s probably not the greatest thing for the users. It has it’s place, I’m sure for a baby’s early life achievements it will be very exciting for the whole family. Just consider sharing these milestones only with a specific friends and family list so that they aren’t part of the greater ether of the Internet for no good reason.If you are thinking of having some historical fun with your timelines then you’ll find quickly, as I did, that one of the unfortunate design points of milestones is that they are limited to events within your lifetime. So it’s kind of like Quantum Leap, you can go back and add fun historical events you could have been a part of you can do that but you can’t talk about your previous lives or work in how you have really interacted with events in the distant past due to your future invention of time travel. Short-sighted design on Facebook’s part I think, but who am I to criticize? I definitely didn’t help Einstein work out the theory of relativity…otherwise it would be on Facebook timeline.However, pages do not have this restriction. A page can have it’s start date as any date after January 1, 1000 C.E. This could be fun depending on your page, but it could also be useful. On this pageI run, for example, I am adding in interesting historical moments relevant to Canadian democratic and reform. Currently these milestones will be interspersed with other posts and links to blogs or news. This can give a way for brands or any organization to provide an interesting and interactive picture of their history in the context of other news and updates all in one place. It might not be as clear and useful as a reference as a simple table of dates on your website, but it’s an engaging way to interact with your followers about your organization’s history. Each milestone has the ubiquitous Like and Comment buttons so your followers can engage with the history you provide right in place.

Feature request: If any at Facebook is listening, to make this Milestones for Pages features really useful it would be great to have a filter that showed only Milestones and no other news or links to allow people to explore the history without other clutter.

Moral of the Story

Whether you are managing a brand for an organization or you are just a regular person who likes staying in touch with your friends and making the occasional public comment, the new age of interconnected information you need to take control of the information being stored about you and consider how it is presented.  The Internet never forgets, but that doesn’t mean you can’t control have some control over how it is presents what it remembers.