Last week, the most popular social networking service underwent a Face(book)lift, with a new look for users’ home pages and a more “stream”lined approach to display of friends’ posts. Reactions thus far seem to be mixed; of those I’ve talked to, some folks hate it, others love it and a few apparently didn’t even notice the changes.
I was ambivalent about it at first. Then I discovered the ability to “turn off” comments from specific friends – without “unfriending” them – and decided that alone was worth the price of admission. I also like the filtering options on the left side. These changes got me to thinking, though, about other ways to make a social networking site like FB better. Here’s my wish list:
- I like that I can separate friends into categories (lists), and I’ve used this feature extensively. I now have lists for Family, Cops, Tech Industry, Writers, and Local Politics. It’s nice that I can click on a category and see just the posts from that group of people. But what I’d really like is the ability to filter the distribution of my own posts by category, so that I could tag a post as “Family” only, or “Tech and Writers” and it would go only to those people, instead of having all my friends be able to see all my posts. I know I post a lot of tech stuff that probably bores/confuses my non-techie family members to death, and I doubt my cop friends really care about my writing travails (except for the couple of cops who are also writers, and I can always put a person in more than one category).
- It’s nice to be able to turn off all comments from a particular person – especially when that person tends to spout a lot of liberal/conservative (choose one, depending your own political persuasion) nonsense in his or her status updates. :) But I don’t always want to go that far. Sometimes someone posts one really annoying thing, but doesn’t make a habit of it. Still, I’d like to get that one post off my home page so I don’t have to look at it all day, without hiding everything the person posts. If there is currently a way to do that, I haven’t found it.
- More integration with other services would be nice, too. I like that my Twitter posts can be automatically fed to Facebook and show up as FB status messages. I’d like it even more if my Windows Live Spaces blog posts were automatically picked up, as well. Maybe there’s a way to do that, but if there is, it’s certainly not made obvious. Doesn’t Microsoft own a small chunk of Facebook? Seems like the two could get together and make it easier to cross post.
These are just a few of my thoughts in regard to how FB could be made more useful. I’m sure there are plenty of other folks out there who have great ideas, too.
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