Creating cover images for Facebook’s timeline is rapidly emerging as a category of applications, with three tools already available less than a week after the new profile format’s introduction.
Coverize.me is very similar to the app we reviewed earlier today, Facebook Covers, minus the latter's Create Collage Cover option, which allows users to select from their friends lists and create a collage to use as their cover images.
Much like Facebook Covers, Coverize.me allows users to create a cover image using existing photos, or to choose from a collection of premade cover images that just might be recycled screensavers, banners or Twitters backgrounds — most likely all three.
Some of the premade covers require you to manually upload them, and all have Coverize.me’s logo at the bottom (if you’re handy with PhotoShop, you can get rid of the vendor’s brand, but we probably shouldn’t endorse that practice).
The categories include: abstract, adult (this one has drug references, rather than anything X-rated), animals, anime, athletes, awareness, cars, cartoons, celebrities, collages, cute, emo, fashion, flags, flowers, for guys, funny, games, girly, Gothic (nothing’s in this one ye!), hearts, holidays, logos, love, military, miscellaneous, movies, music, nature, patterns, professions, quotes, religion, sports, technology, video games and welcome.
And Facebook Timeline Cover Creator, from Tab Creator developer FaceItPages.com, adds the ability to include information such as a biography, a logo or graphic, and links to other social networking sites, as well as an instant preview option.
However, Facebook Timeline Cover Creator only offers a handful of premade images, unlike the other two apps.
A rather pointless effort to compensate for the small selection: Facebook Timeline Creator says you can upload your own image to be created as a cover image, but doesn’t do the work of inserting your chosen graphic into the cover space. Uploading anything here doesn’t help you in any way.
So far, all three apps we’ve seen for creating covers for Facebook’s timeline seem rudimentary at best, but that’s perfectly acceptable given how new this profile layout is on Facebook.
In the future, we’d expect to see more sophistication in timeline cover creation tools. For now, we’re happy to see anything that helps the artistically challenged come up with things to put in an area that takes up almost half of the screen in the new profiles.
Readers, when you convert to the timeline profile, will you simply choose a premade cover image, or do you feel that since it's the first and largest element other Facebook users will see, will you opt for creating one yourself?
Source: All Facebook
Wednesday, September 28, 2011