It’s the biggest change to ever happen to Facebook, largely because it completely redefines Facebook’s purpose in your life.  Facebook started as a “re-creation” of the college experience.  Essentially, it was a place where college kids could relive last night’s kegger, “poke” friends, and stalk classmates of the opposite sex.

Those days of Facebook are long gone, and that has never been more apparent than with the upcoming release.  ”Facebook Timeline” is essentially your life story in a digital format.  You can document your birth, your relationship history, your changes in eating habits, your work and education, and much more.  For a solid overview check out the video that Facebook put out cover it: Facebook Timeline Video.

For those of you who are terrified of change, here are 4 couple tips that will help you get your new profile setup:

1.  Facebook Cover Photo

This is the giant photo that will sit behind your Profile Picture.  For the more technically inclined you can create a custom photo to really make your profile look good.  The image size to use is 840 x 310.

For those of you that just want to use a standard photo there are a couple of websites that are already set up that allow you to download Facebook “Cover Photos”.  Here is a link from Mashable covering a couple of them: Facebook Timeline: 5 Sites for Customizing Your Cover Photo.

Or, you can just do a Google image search looking for the exact dimensions of 840×310.

2.  You’re Such a Square

The new Facebook Profile Picture is going to be a square.  A 180 x 180 square to be exact.  Most people have some form of software for cropping photos, but if you don’t you can go to sites like this.

3.  The Past…Is Easily Accessible in the Present

Your Facebook history is literally a click away.  With the new “Activity Log” your entire Facebook history is only a click away.  Want to know who you poked in August of 2007?  It’s a simple click away.  It currently says up top “A Private Log of Your Activity”, I wouldn’t be surprised to find features like this to cause a whole new wave privacy issues.

…Coming Soon…

So let’s just say that I didn’t have my dentist’s phone number on speed dial, and to be completely honest – I had forgotten where their office was.  I remembered my dentists name, so I did what any 25 year old would do – I Googled the dentists name.  (If you’re surprised that I didn’t pull out my handy address book or look in the yellow pages then you MUST keep reading)

After Googling his name, it was on to the adventure of figuring out the office address, their telephone number, the office hours — but to my disdain, it didn’t look like they had a website.  So what should have taken 1 minute to do ended up taking 10-15 minutes instead.

After the joy of having a stranger scraping and cleaning my teeth I struck up a conversation with the dentist about what I do for a living.  We briefly discussed some of the online marketing opportunities available, and my general dissatisfaction with my experience trying to find their business online.

Let’s take a step back and look at this from a big picture point of view.  As an existing customer of theirs, what did I want out of my online experience with them?

1. Google their business name and find it ranked #1 on Google (easy to do when looking for a specific business name – look up Justin Sterenberg and see what site comes up #1)
2. Find their phone number and address
3. Find this in about a minute

Simply put, that didn’t happen.  This is just a guess, but I would venture that about 80% of small businesses provide online customer experiences that fall far short of what their customers are looking for.  The sad part is that this is a simple problem to fix.  It doesn’t require a $20k flash based website, an optimized PPC campaign running split tests, or a multi-year SEO campaign.  It requires a simple website build and a submission to Google Places, which you can have built for less than the crown you just put into your last appointment.

How man of you have had similar issues?  Are you already a customer of a business that can’t find that business online?  Sound off in the comments section below.

In my opinion, AskMen.com is like an online version of GQ, only it’s for straight-guys who don’t have trust funds.  The articles on the site are also clearly meant for men, as they usually consist of a 5-10 bullet points with a corresponding paragraph.  It’s functional, it’s logical, it’s to the point.

The 2009 version of “The Great Male Survey” came out on their site this week, and as someone who voted I wanted to check it out.  And so, sticking with the theme of functional, logical, bullet-pointed posts – here are my 7 reactions from the AskMen.com “Great Male Survey” of 2009…

1.  The Belief in the Institution of Marriage

75% of respondents said “Yes, I believe it is a necessary institution, and one that I will participate in to help preserve” when asked if they believed in marriage.  Ahh, there may still be hope for our generation.

If you are getting married, try and find a way to top this for your wedding entrance:

2.  More to Love?

52% of readers said that no, they wouldn’t dump their girlfriend if she became too fat.  Of course, that means that 48% of readers said that yes, they would dump their girlfriend if she became too fat.  C’est l’amore.

3.  Wanted: Sugar Momma’

83% of respondants said that yes, they would be in a relationship with a woman who had a higher income than them.  I don’t know if this stat is accredited to men starting to be cool with women making more than them, or the flat-out fact that the economy is just plain scary right now.  Either way, it looks like the majority of men don’t mind if their woman makes more cheese than them.

4.  Give It Some Time

61% of men said that the economic crisis hasn’t directly affected their career progress.  Give it time fellas, he’s only been in office a couple of months.

5.  Brad Pitt Was Seen Walking Into a Starbucks Today!

When asked if they followed celebrity gossip, 81% said “No, gossip is for women.”  Amen to that.  It’s clear that men have far more important things to focus on than trivial things like celebrity gossip, like fantasy football for example.

6.  Obamanation

When asked which male celebrity they were tired of hearing about, Barack Obama tied Alex Rodriguez for first with 21% of readers voting for him.  Obama’s poll results are also worse than George W.’s at this point in his tenure in office.  Now that the lights are dimming on our prom king president maybe people will see that everything that is being done to ‘stimulate the economy’ is really all about giving as much of our power over to the federal government as Barry O can squeeze out of us.

7.  Getting It Right Guys

57% of men said that being a good husband/and or father who takes care of his family was the #1 thing that makes a manly man in 2009.  Much to my surprise, being wealthy was lowest on the list with only 2%.  For this answer I offer a tip of the hat and a clip of a cigar to the fathers and husbands taking care of business at home.