What are the advantages of this style of timeline - other than less scrolling?
Lets take this to the extream. Lets say you had a serverlog with 1 million entries and you had to parse it by hand for what ever reason. would you rather see
[Jun 10, 12:32] /index.html 200 54ms nick
[Jun 10, 12:32] /index.html 200 54ms nick
[Jun 10, 12:32] /index.html 200 54ms nick
[Jun 10, 12:32] /index.html 200 54ms nick
[Jun 10, 12:32] /index.html 200 54ms nick
or this
[Jun 10, 12:32] /index.html 200 54ms nick
[Jun 10, 12:32] /index.html 200 54ms nick
[Jun 10, 12:32] /index.html 200 54ms nick
Just because I'm browsing my friends activity doesn't mean that I want to waste time trying to follow their god awful timeline with the jumps and the zig zags and the figureing out what came before what.
The other thing you're not considering is that Facebook displays more than just text. If you're displaying images inline as well as text, it's going to be more compact if you interpolate each post in a zig-zag fashion rather than making posts vertically serial.
The example you provided doesn't really illustrate why timeline is bad for a website because it's an example provided in a completely different context.
tl;dr Website design is not command line interface design.
I would expect with a better design the back-and-forth would flow would look a lot easier on the eyes.
Is it just because facebook does it, or do you have some other strong reason for using it.
I'd like to look back over a year and seeing how much OSS work I got done.
I was considering firing off requests to find out the latest status of PullRequests and indicating that in the design. e.g. When pull requests were merged in and closed.
I hope you all like it thought!
But this would be even cooler if it would be a timeline of all the projects, organizations I am part of. Sort of the Github Dashboard as a timeline, but with additional logic to group certain events (commits for example) per project to reduce the clutter and with all the organizations in one dashboard (currently you have to use the dropdown to switch between them).