If you have access to Timeline, the new profile feature Facebook has been rolling out in waves, you may have noticed something odd when modifying or adding events and statuses along your digital life. When clicking on that little pencil hovering to the right of your friend’s posts, you are given a few options. You’ll see the standard “delete post”, “report as Spam” and “Hide from Timeline” options, but now a new selection has surfaced: “Change Date”.
Clicking on this option will of course, change the date to anywhere in the past. So if someone wished you a happy birthday a few days after it happened, you can move that belated post back to your birthday date where it belongs. Unfortunately, that’s the only example (I can think of) to show how this option would provide useful.
That being said, I’m not sure if this is a new feature or a glitch. Discovered by Sam Biddle over at Gizmodo, this date option only applies to statuses that friends have placed on your Timeline wall, not their own. As I browsed my friend list and visited a few profiles, I noticed a lot of them were not using the new Timeline feature, so it’s something many may not have noticed yet.
Facebook has given you control on Timeline by giving you access to add to your digital history. You can add events you may have forgotten or are missing when they occurred. You are able to add pictures and statuses to old birthdays, vacations or important life events and place them in their respective times, all the way to down to your birth.
A thing to note is while you can still change the dates on your friend’s posts on your wall, you are only able to predate them, not send them in the future. When this is done, a new small clock icon appears next to that status; when you hover your mouse over it, the accurate timestamp appears.
Although I can’t think of a legitimate reason why this would prove useful, maybe someone else with a broader view of things can. Timeline isn’t a Facebook feature that has been rolled out to everyone quite yet but can have access to it now if you wish and see how the date modification works. If this is a new Facebook glitch, then expect to have it removed soon.
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