In what seemed like an unrelated move, in September, Facebook announced a brand new type of profile called Timeline, where your whole personal history is laid out by month-by-month, all the way back to your birth. At the time, Facebook described it to consumers as a chance to: “Share and highlight your most memorable posts, photos and life events on your timeline. This is where you can tell your story from beginning, to middle, to now.” By the end of this year all 800 million plus Facebook profiles will have been converted to this new interface.

What most users don’t know is that the new features being introduced are all centered around increasing the value of Facebook to advertisers, to the point where Facebook representatives have been selling the idea that Timeline is actually about re-conceptualizing users around their consumer preferences, or as they put it, “brands are now an essential part of people’s identities.”

The name itself is cleverly designed to conceal the fact that your profile no longer arranges information chronologically. Yes, things are laid out by year and by month. But, when it comes to what’s displayed to your social circle at any given time, other metrics, including direct payments to Facebook itself, will now influence the ranking and placement of stories. This payola will be a crucial part of the graph rank, the new metric for placement that the social network uses to determine what appears on your profile.

Once again: it doesn’t matter how great and fun an experience is, good UI design cannot fix a broken solution. Good design can effectively differentiate a good solution, and bad design can completely ruin a good solution. But good design simply cannot make up for a solution that doesn’t address a core user need really well. As a recent post on ZURBlog proclaimed, people don’t buy products – they buy the benefit.

I’m afraid that in the case of both Google Circles and Path 2.0, they might just be flawed solutions wrapped in a layer of beautiful UI design. It’s fun to play with for a while, but when it inevitably becomes tedious you eventually just forget to use it. Forever.

As more of my own peers join Path and Google+ still resembling the remnants of a ghost town, the benefits of both are starting to dwindle for me. What happened to attacking the problem of sharing for "normal people"?

Path was originally meant for sharing only with your 50 closest friends, but since Path 2.0 I can't help but add friends that send me a request that I don't really consider super close. And when I do, they're over sharing the most mundane of things (i.e. self-portraits, napping on a Tuesday afternoon, listening to Lady Gaga, etc.) without giving me too much control on what I see (aside from booting them). Path really is a personal journal, but do you really want your friends reading it?

There's no question the app is beautiful, but I don't know how much longer it will prove to be beneficial for my own sharing needs.

Admittedly, Path was more fun when I was just friends with my girlfriend.

Google+ has not solved any need for me as of late. It's great for the occasional sharing of a funny .gif or YouTube video with the same circle of friends, but social media pundits have seemed to overtake the network. Where are all the "normal people"? Of course, they could just be sharing privately, but what does Google+ do for me an email couldn't serve just as well?

This post is more so about my own sharing preferences and not a critique of the services. The private sharing idea is still new to a lot of people, but the benefits are so immense that it will be the decisive factor in a future where more "normal people" are cognizant of privacy, ease of use, and overall benefit.

The Posterous study, conducted by Harris Interactive Survey, polled over 2,000 social network users, aged 18 and over, showed that Facebook seems to have people sharing less, which is obviously not the effect they were going for.

Seven in ten of the survey respondents believe that Facebook is all for public sharing, and with its most recent changes, particularly the one which allows you to ‘subscribe’ to other users, that isn’t surprising.

While Facebook is attempting to compete with Google+’s circle system gives users a more obvious and simple method of sharing content only with the people you want to – according to Posterous – the private sharing market is wide open for the taking.

61% of those surveyed said that they would share more if they had more control over exactly what it is they were sharing. Facebook is the main culprit of confusion, with 68% of Facebook users saying they don’t understand the social network’s privacy settings. And with how often they’re changed, can you really blame them?