Techno-futurist Newt Gingrich has adopted Facebook's new Timeline feature with a detailed accounting of his life story, there are some things from Gingrich's past that do not make the cut, among them his first two marriages.

Gingrich's timeline stretches all the way back to his birth, then documents his high school education, and then, in 1963, "Kathy Gingrich Lubbers was Born." From whose womb his daughter sprang, Newt does not say. 

It's not that the timeline isn't detailed. In fact, it's full of Gingrich's greatest moments, like being picked as Time's Man of the Year in 1995 and becoming speaker of the House. But like many of his fellow oversharers, Gingrich has done some editing. He notes leaving the House of Representatives in 1999, and getting married in 2000, but not getting censored for ethics violations or divorcing his second wife in between. Naturally, he doesn't mention working as a historian for Freddie Mac in the 2000s either.

As The Atlantic Wire's Rebecca Greenfield pointed out when Timeline debuted, there are some things in the Facebook archives a user might want to highlight, and others one might want to hide. So the story is not so much political campaigns adapting to young folks' social media sites as social media sites training young folks to be politicians.

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Elspeth Reeve