I’ve recently had a look at Facebook’s new feature, Timeline, and published mine in the process. With it, you can organize your news and shares along a temporal line design, that has already been called bloglike in some places. I think it’s a fantastic feature. The tagline of it is: Tell your life story with a new kind of profile

Great. But there’s more stories to tell, and Facebook is getting oh so close to letting us tell them. I wish it would inch a little further.

But before I get into what’s missing, let’s look at why this matters. Malcom Gladwell has looked in depth at how trends go viral in a famous 2000 book called The Tipping Point. In there, he explains the profile of who exactly helps people adopt those trends. Indeed, those connectors follow some sort of Pareto Principle where 20 percent of people make up 80 percent of the information exchange work necessary for people to adopt a trend and make it go viral. This means that giving those few key people the means to express themselves matters, even if they only makeup for a fraction of the general population.

Basically, a trend extends its outreach through the actions of connectors, who embody a hub of contacts reaching across different social groups, salesmen, with the charisma to make us believe their story, and mavens, who are information specialists with a genuine desire to help others. Contrarily to Gladwell, I’m not sure people fit one or the other profile in all aspects fo their lives. But I recognize those roles around me, and I feel relatively familiar with the maven.

Mavens have stories to tell. Detailed, involved, engaging, fascinating stories. But since they’re connectors, they don’t necessarily like dry, formal lessons you could find in a book. They have human stories, that they personally want to take a bunch of their peers through. No wonder why I identify.

For instance, among other things, I’m a fan of a genre of music commonly called by such labels as post-rock, especially a branch of it bearing the even scarier moniker of math-rock. I try to know everything I can about it. What most people do know about it, though, is that at the local hipster coffee shop, there’s a dude with abstract art on his T-shirt and a suede jacket on that thinks and says anything else is crap. And it pains me personnally that it’s what most people will keep knowing of it.

Math-rock seems so hermetic because, like so much music at the fringes right about now, it is an exploratory front of a long history of mixing influences and perspectives. The way I’d go telling people about math rock it is essentially a connective experience : I’d start writing a couple of weekly paragraphs about how the musical story went, tracing links between things seemingly very distinct. I’d relate how progressive rock started laying some tracks in the 60s, tell you where Don Cab’s crazy time signatures fit into this, and how the indie scene reappropriated some of this technique with an emotional influence that permeates through some of the more airy music you have probably enjoyed in the score of a couple of Michael Mann’s latest movies. I would add links to a couple of tracks you could grab on iTunes at the end of each post and listen to on the car ride home. And by the way, a bunch of us are going to that concert I think you’d like next week, would you like to join ? Here’s the Facebook page for the event.

Does that approach means I’m a maven ? No idea. Is that sort of behavior maven-like ? You betcha. This kind of story is not reserved to a few select experts — otherwise I would be hard-pressed to explain why I would be entitled to raise my voice on the subject. We all have friends who introduced us, more or less informally, but always personally, to their interests and passions, musical or otherwise.

And it works, more or less. I mean, if the genre is far from your thing, putting it in context alone is not going to make it so. But my experience in ventures of that sort (k-lophonies) shows people enjoy the story, in the sense that some context makes the music “familiar” enough for them to enjoy. I myself have been on the receiving end of some similar get-togethers about classical music that I’ve greatly benefited from. And hopefully, next time people meet the obnoxious hipster type at the coffee shop, they’ll be able to steer him or her towards a less annoying approach to talking about music.

Now, Facebook has events, notes, and links. One thing I think is missing from the user experience — and I think one of the reasons people don’t blog on Facebook — is the option to unwind a string between those nuggets of context. Something that would let a friend who skipped the first few installments of my informal introduction to math rock catch up. Something that would, more importantly, form a connective experience through a story over the course of a few weeks.

And Facebook’s Timeline is getting very close to this: I do have a life story, but I have other stories as well. Facebook could help me tell them, and in so doing, connect better with people.