A while back I did a blog post on Facebook’s new Timeline feature.  Since then it’s been officially rolled out and expanded a bit.  One feature of the Timeline that I did not cover was that of the Life Event.  I’m here to fix that since it seems that Facebook is trying to have your entire life’s big events  for all your friends, family, and in some situations the public, to see in one spot. And they have made it pretty easy to let you do this.  I’d like to first point out it’s not entirely my fault that I missed it the first time around.  here is the “What’s on your mind” status update screen from the first Timeline roll out.  Notice all those little icons?  Yea I didn’t pay much attention to them either.

Here’s the current version of the “What’s on your mind section”.  Notice the difference?  All the icons have now been replaced with a very intuitive and hard to miss “Life Events” section.  And even better, it keeps changing depending on what you choose.

So what exactly do you get if you chose a Life event? Well, that depends on the category.  Life events are divided into 5 categories:

Work and Education

Home & Living

Health & Wellness

Travel & Experience

Once you choose a category and a Life Event you then are presented with a number of options.  The options will vary depending on what event you selected.  Most events will have some similarities though.  You can add new photos or choose from existing ones in your albums.  Most events will also have a date you can choose from (although only required info is the year.  You can add or skip the month and date if you prefer).  You can also write an optional story to be associated with the event.

You can also choose how widely visible the Life Event will be.  By default it will be set to Public, but you can include just your Friends or a custom group (friends, friends of friends, specific friends or lists, or even just visible to yourself).  You can also choose any list you’ve already created.  This gives you a lot of options to control who sees what events.

Any event you add will automatically be considered a star’d event.  The thinking is if you spent enough time to add something from the past, chances are it’s important.  You can always un-star it.

In the end, you can have anything that might have been important listed for your friends, family, or Public to see.  It’s rather nice to add things from before you could have had Facebook.  Pictures are typically associated with events so you can add whole albums to things that happened in your past.  Overall a rather nice feature.