5 key moments that changed Facebook

Facebook had ambitious plans when it rolled out its initial iteration of Timeline on Sept. 22, 2011. It was to be a two-column page full of status updates, shared links and photos, laid out in a wall of tiles.

The most important posts could take up more screen real estate than the others, and over time, Facebook would automatically hide less significant entries from your wall. You could even retroactively add in events from your past to flesh out the online record of your life.

Users viewed it as noisy and confusing to use. Eventually, Facebook reverted back to a more conservative single column layout with many of Timeline's more intriguing features vanishing into the cyber-ether.

It wasn't the first and only time Facebook has introduced a feature, only to roll it back. Last year, Facebook scaled back the Ticker column, which provided a secondary, real-time quick look at your friends' activities. Instead of taking up a strip of your screen on the far right, it has been relegated to a tiny little box in the lower left-hand corner.