Facebook revealed an upcoming restructuring of its profile design, dubbed “Timeline,” at its Facebook event in San Francisco last week, causing a mixed reaction.

The redesign is intended to make a person’s profile read more like a personal history on Facebook, complete with a new design that resembles a digital scrapbook.

“Timeline is the story of your life…in a new way to express who you are,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated during the announcement of the redesign.

Timeline dramatically alters the way a person’s profile is viewed by separating it into two columns which are chronologically ordered from top to bottom, beginning with the most recent posts made.

The column on the left blows up images, posts and stories that are selected, while the column on the right serves as the “timeline,” allowing a person to search through a profile and find activity down to a specific date.

Timeline doesn’t just stretch back to the date a person joined Facebook, it also draws off posted information like a person’s birthday and creates events along the timeline for them as well.

Privacy settings will remain but users will now have the opportunity to highlight what appears most prominently on their profile page by clicking on a star next to the item.

Another change with the redesign that is intended to augment Timeline’s scrapbook approach is in the status updates.

Status updates are being expanded to include five new icons for tagging that include: Work and Education, Family and Relationships, Living, Health and Wellness along with Milestones and Experiences.

By selecting one of these options, a user is then able to select a more specific kind of event within each category, such as “moved” in the Living category and can fill out a few fields in a new window with the details of the event.

Facebook is also attempting to respond to complaints that have been levied against it for years concerning privacy settings with another attempt to streamline the process for users.

A new View Activity section is being added with Timeline that serves as a private log for each user to view any of their activity on Facebook and allowing for changes to privacy settings post-by-post.

The redesign applies to user profiles only, and won’t affect the latest changes to go live on Facebook’s home page, namely changes to the news feed and the addition of the ticker.

The changes have garnered a largely negative response from Facebook users and recent polls indicate that the Timeline redesign is being met with the same general dislike.

A poll of over 1,000 users by Sodahead following the announcement found 86 percent of respondents believe Facebook should abandon the most recent changes and plans for the Timeline redesign.

Since its founding, Facebook has gone through multiple changes to its user interface, even at the risk of alienating users, and with Timeline slated to launch in the next couple  weeks it seems that the company intends to follow through on this policy.