The invention provides a display interface in a social networking system that enables the presentation of information related to a user in a timeline view. The system accesses information about a user of a social networking system. The system then selects one or more of these pieces of data and/or activities from a certain time period and gathers them into timeline units based on their relatedness and their relevance to users. These timeline units are ranked by relevance to the user, and a diversity policy is applied to prevent overrepresentation of timeline unit type(s). The timeline units are used to generate a timeline view for the user containing visual representations of the timeline units organized by location or time. The timeline view is then provided to other users of the social networking system that wish to view information about the user.