The average person spends approximately an hour per day on the social site Facebook. It’s a crucial part of both the present and the future, whether we like it or not. It helps teens procrastinate and adults get in touch with old friends. However, now the site is launching a new, and absolutely un-optional profile chage called Timeline. And the anticipation was far from the good kind.

Facebook’s new Timeline feature should better accommodate users’ preferences.

Facebook exists chiefly for entertainment purposes. If people are far from entertained by Timeline, then it should be an optional feature. The role of Facebook is not to dissatisfy users. It should not be an antagonistic web site. At its core, social networking is an entertainment medium, so there is no reason why Zuckerberg should continue with making the feature absolute if the general population of Facebook seems to be against the change.

Current relationships displayed on Facebook are done at the user’s discretion. What about the ones the user would rather forget about? These are deletable, but with the old version of Facebook, there was hardly a need to delete things that happened years ago since it would take so much time to go through a person’s feed. Now, this information is out there for everyone and the rude reminder of who all you “had a high school thing with” is out for the world to see.

Facebook might use the old argument of, “well, you didn’t HAVE to keep the relationship status up,” just like you didn’t have to post that awkward freshman year profile picture and you didn’t have to leave up all those old statuses. But perhaps the greater point is that now Facebook is forcing its users to clean up after messy relationship ends and questionable photos when they used to just get lost in the ancient news feed of a profile.

Facebook should take into consideration that most users would rather their entire Facebook history not show up on their profile. The Timeline feature should be optional.