Facebook has rolled out its new Timeline feature to the masses.

This ultra-illustrative, chronological listing of posts, photos, shared links, check-ins, and more is a radically different arrangement than the Facebook profile you've been used to.

And now that your life can be exposed for everyone to see -- and scrutinize -- you may be interested in curating the new interface. Once you've activated Facebook Timeline (go here to do so), you've got seven days to tweak it to make sure it's just how you like before it goes live for everyone to see.

Below are five quick tips on how to personalize, privatize, and generally get the most out of Facebook's newest feature. It doesn't take long to master the new interface, and it's an important exercise for anyone interested in, well, reputation management.

1. Privacy 101: How to hide things

You probably already know that Facebook has controversial positions on privacy. So you may now find that some things included on your Timeline are best kept from curious eyes. This could be anything from an embarrassing status message you posted in simpler social media times, to a rant your ex left on your wall a few months ago.

To hide a Timeline element, click the pencil icon at the top of the offending post, then choose "Hide from Timeline." Easy.

And please note: Any privacy settings you've already set still apply to the Timeline interface. So the photos of you getting wild at last weekend's kegger are still safe from Mom.

If you prefer to keep your profile public, but don't want everyone to see what you posted back in high school, for example, you can also tweak your Timeline settings more generally. Click the arrow next to your Home button at the top of the screen to access your Privacy Settings. Scroll down to "Limit the Audience for Past Posts," then choose "Manage Past Post Visibility." Now click "Limit Old Posts" -- all

2. Tell your life story: How to add past events

Privacy, schmivacy! Perhaps, you want the whole world to know the day you were born, the first time you rode a bike, and that debate club award you got in high school. These events aren't listed on your Timeline, but they can be.

To add a status update, photo, place check-in, or life event to your Timeline, simply hover the mouse over the line in the center of the page until it turns into a plus sign, and reveals the option to add one of those four types of posts.

Now, Facebook can accurately reflect your entire life -- and not just the events that occurred after you first signed on.

3. Add some individuality: How to customize your Timeline

There are a number of ways you can personalize your Timeline so it highlights the posts, pictures and events you cherish most.

First, you can add a cover to your Timeline. Toward the top of your profile, above the buttons where it says "Update Info," you should see "Add a Cover." Once you click that, you can select an image from your photos, or opt to upload a new image. Once it loads, you can adjust the positioning of your cover image.

If you set a cover photo and then decide it's not as great as you first thought, just hover your mouse over the image, and a "Change Cover" option menu will pop up, letting you reposition the image or select a new one.

For photo albums you've created, you can change the primary photo that displays (you could do this before, but now the process is different). Simply click the pencil icon in the upper corner of the album post, and select "Change Primary Photo."

You can also choose to highlight a post -- expanding it from a small, half-page-size post to a wide-screen version — by selecting the star icon in the post's upper-right corner. Conversely, you can click the star on a maximized featured post to make it normal again.

4. Appearances matter: How to check out your Timeline from different angles

If you decide to make a number of posts and photos private or hidden from your Timeline, you can still get the full, complete view of your Facebook action history.

On your Timeline, click "Activity Log." There you'll find posts and information you need to review before it publishes to your profile, as well as a complete look at your interactions on Facebook. This is log completely private to you.

You can choose to filter what you see by clicking the "All" dropdown menu at the top. You can choose to see only your posts, posts by others, posts from specific Facebook apps ("Hmm, let's look at my past Farmville accomplishments"), photos and more.

Like before, you can also check how others view your profile. Next to "Activity Log" is a cog icon. Click that, and you can choose "View As..." and either enter a friend's name or click the "public" link to see how your profile looks to strangers.

5. Information overload: How to organize friends and filter updates

Now that your Timeline is all straightened out, you might as well do some house cleaning on what shows up in your Newsfeed.

When you add a friend or follow someone's public updates, Facebook automatically sets the level of posts you see to "Most Updates." You can change this by going to that profile, and clicking the "Subscribed" button. You can change it to "Only Important" updates or "All updates," and you can also filter what types of posts you're interested in seeing: things like life events, status updates, or photos.

And if you haven't done so already, you can organize friends into lists, a la the Google+ Circles feature. Facebook Lists rolled out in September.

Just go to the left-hand side of your Newsfeed page, click "More," and toward the bottom you'll see "Lists." You can add friends individually to lists like Close Friends, Family, or Co-workers. You can click "More" next to Lists to add other lists of your choosing — "Acquaintances," "Poker Club Members," you get the picture.

The average Facebook user has 130 friends, but I'd venture to say that most of you reading this have far more than that, so this will help streamline your Facebooking experience.

One last thing: If you're one of those people who's still into "poking" your friends, you can still do that. Go to your friend's profile, and the Poke option is listed under a gear cog dropdown menu next to "Message."

"Like it or not, preteens want social networking," says Parry Aftab, author of A Parent's Guide to the Internet and founder of the online children's safety organizations WiredSafety and StopCyberbullying. "And until or unless Facebook creates special family accounts or a special Facebook for preteens, there is a need and a market."

Togetherville is one site for kids.

The need is undeniable; the market potentially huge and lucrative. Companies are gearing up for this gold rush by creating websites strictly for children, and websites that allow parents to create profiles for their kids.

Caroline Knorr, parenting editor at Common Sense Media — an independent group that reviews the media in kids' lives — keeps an eye on kid-oriented social networks.

"The key to all of this for parents — for getting the most out of social networking and all technology," Knorr says, "is understanding the technology, setting usage rules, setting privacy settings and, most importantly, training your kids to practice responsible online behavior."

Kids have a hard time, Knorr says, "really understanding that anything they say or do online can get copied, forwarded and used by other kids. Kids can't fathom the vast anonymous audiences on the Web. As parents, you can get them to think about their digital footprint and what kind of trail they're creating."

The group's website provides tips for parents with young kids, middle schoolers and teenagers. And it offers a list of some recommended social network sites for kids:

1. ScuttlePad (2010) Age 7+

Social network with training wheels is safe but limited.

2. Togetherville (2010) Age 7+

Kids' social site connects to parents' Facebook friends.

3. WhatsWhat.me (2011) Age7+

Tween social network with top-notch safety features.

4. Yoursphere (2009) Age 9+

Kid-only social network promises to block dangerous adults.

5. Franktown Rocks (2009) Age 10+

Music and social networking combine in safe, cool hangout.

6. GiantHello (2010) Age 10+

Facebook-lite gets a lot right, but watch out for games.

7. GirlSense (2009) Age 10+

Safe, creative community for tween fashionistas.

8. Sweety High (2010) Age 11+

Fun, closed social network for girls is strong on privacy.

9. Imbee (2011) Age 10+

Safer social networking if parents stay involved.

10. YourCause (2009) Age 13+

An easy, fun, socially networked way to fundraise.

On Thursday, Business Insider reported that China is trying to buy “a huge chunk” of Facebook.

According to the business news website, Beijing approached a fund that buys stock from former Facebook employees to see if it could assemble a stake large enough “to matter.”  Moreover, Citibank is rumored to be trying to acquire as much as $1.2 billion of stock for two sovereign wealth funds, one from the Middle East and the other Chinese.  Business Insider reports a third source, from a “very influential” Silicon Valley investment bank, confirms that Citi is representing China.

Should Beijing be allowed to buy a part of Mark Zuckerberg’s site?  Business Insider tells us there is “little need” for concern about Chinese censors looking at the photos and postings of the 700 million people who trust Facebook with their personal online activity.

First, China’s position won’t be large.  A billion-dollar investment does not buy much influence in a site expected to be worth a hundred times that when it goes public.  Second, Beijing will be acquiring nonvoting stock.  Third, shareholders don’t get the right to look at what’s on the site.  All of these arguments from Business Insider ring true.

Yet they are all beside the point—and there are other reasons to be concerned.  The business site says that “sovereign wealth funds are pretty distinct from their governments.”

Perhaps Norway’s fund is, but not China’s.  The Communist Party, despite three decades of economic reform, insists on its monopoly of political power.  And to maintain that monopoly, it tightly controls its own instrumentalities.  That’s especially true at this moment because the Party is in the midst of the most comprehensive crackdown on society since the 1989 Beijing Spring.  Chinese leaders clearly view social media as a threat to their rule, especially after seeing its force-multiplying effect in the ongoing Arab Spring protests that have toppled governments.

In short, China’s sovereign wealth fund, which is no more independent of the Communist Party than the Beijing municipal government, wants to buy a stake in the world’s most prominent social networking site because Chinese leaders want to control social media.  And they hope to do that as part of their comprehensive campaign to dominate the conversation about China—not just inside the country but around the world as well.

Beijing, during the last decade, announced initiatives to change discourse on foreign university campuses with its Confucius Institutes—now 322 of them—and Confucius Classrooms in elementary and high schools—369 of those.  Moreover, its “go global” initiative is trying to affect news coverage of China by opening bureaus outside the country to internationalize state media, especially Xinhua News Agency, China Central Television, and People’s Daily.

And this is where the Facebook founder is giving Beijing an opening.  Zuckerberg visited China in December and is scheduled to return, perhaps in September, in his bid to access the world’s largest online community, 457 million at last count.

“One big reason American firms stumble in China is that the government tends to favor locals when it comes to regulation,” Business Insider points out.  “One way to make sure that doesn’t happen is to allow the government to own a stake.”

Beijing wants to own stakes in foreign firms because it is trying to control them.  Its ambitions may at the moment look unrealistic to us, but that does not mean swaggering—and strategic-thinking—Communist Party officials do not hold them.

The cocky Chinese are not the only parties deluding themselves.  Zuckerberg, in the words of one reporter, “believes that Facebook can be an agent of change in China, as it has been in countries such as Egypt and Tunisia.”  After the disastrous China experiences of Yahoo and Google and the troubled history of Microsoft there—not to mention Beijing’s recent tirade against foreign social media—the Facebook founder appears both arrogant and naïve.

Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg is reportedly “wary about the compromises Facebook would have to make to do business there.”  If she loses her argument with Zuckerberg and Facebook enters China, the company will eventually be subject to demands to censor its sites, those both inside and outside China.  That’s apparently why the Chinese want to own a big stake in Facebook.  They are, in short, looking for control in the long run.  No other explanation is consistent with the Party’s other media and “educational” initiatives.

Of course, a Beijing-influenced Facebook will be hit by even more bad publicity—and inevitably defections.  Other social networking sites will spring up to capture fleeing users.  The genius of America is that its open and broad market eventually punishes the arrogant and the naïve by allowing choice.

So who says MySpace is dead?  Perhaps Rupert Murdoch sold it too soon.

We are the connected generation. Thanks to our ever-present mobile devices we are always ‘on’ and connected. This allows us to capture a record of all the great things we do, and share our experiences, our recommendations and our memorable moments with friends, colleagues and the world at large, through the medium of popular social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Yelp. We broadcast these moments out to the rest of the world. We let others share in our passions and see the details of our daily lives. We have become the lifeblood of information for our friends and followers, and they have taken on the role of gatekeepers as we filter and pump information from network to network.

As the opportunities to share information have become more ubiquitous, there has been an increasingly hyped-up debate and concern around the topic of privacy. But is privacy really the issue? As Jeff Jarvis rightly points out, the reason for using social services is for sharing, not hiding. Twitter and Instagram are prime examples of this, where the user is forced to choose between sharing everything or limiting their sharing to a personally selected group who apply for the privilege. Nonetheless, the fact is that although many of us want to share, we want to be able to fine-tune our audience. This challenges services like Facebook where you determine sharing settings in advance of your broadcast.

Has the notion of a ‘friend’ become too diluted by the many different definitions of ‘contact’ across social media networks? Path is trying to redefine this by limiting the number of friends you can add to 50, encouraging you to only share with your “real friends.” But then the question is whether this really solves the issue? Do we only want to share with our close social circle, or do we (as I would argue) have things we want to share with other groups of contacts we would not classify as “friends”?

The problem is that there is currently no universal standard for privacy settings. Each social network has implemented their own interpretation as it applies to types of content shared on their platform. As social networks open up their APIs, allowing users to give third parties access to their content, their social media content can become spread across multiple services. Every network defines their privacy and sharing settings differently, so there is significant ambiguity around how these settings translate when transferring content among services. If you try to inherit privacy settings from multiple services the level of complexity that results is enormously challenging both from a development and a user perspective.

No one has solved this problem yet, and it is a highly relevant and important issue that needs to be addressed. We need a platform where you can manage and arrange all your connections into one simple structure, allowing you to easily define the privacy layers for how, and with whom, you share your content online. And this platform needs to integrate all the social networks.

Facebook Connect was a good first attempt at this, but sadly they quickly closed down their API that allowed you to invite your Facebook Friends to join third-party services. Now you can only view and add friends who are already signed up to that service. The continuation of Facebook Connect in its original form would have made Facebook the major organ of social media sharing, pumping content between networks and controlling the flow to new arteries of social circulation. For users, this would have allowed them greater control and continuity of how their content was shared beyond the confines of Facebook’s network.

Until we create a unified theory of sharing across social networks, there will continue to be great concern around the conflicting definitions of individual privacy. Regulators, in their efforts to protect internet users, are already discussing how to create barriers to protect the individual and simultaneously stifle social sharing. What we need is not greater personal protection through legal limitations, but consistency and standards that are recognized across social networks.

This past week the Google+ platform was revealed, ushering in a promising new chapter in the movement towards a universal standard of privacy. Google+’s ‘circles’ interface allows users to easily organize their network of contacts into spheres of association. Their organizational model for privacy takes what Facebook has developed one step further by allowing the user to easily visualize their different spheres of contacts, and determine which group they want to share updates with as the final step in broadcasting content. Wouldn’t it be great if I could link that structure to all of my other social networks? Let’s hope that Google+ hurdles past the point where Facebook Connect retreated from and becomes the new heart of social network sharing.