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3 ways to fix Facebook
Sunday, 3 January 2010 — by Wayne Smallman
Facebook is broken, from the very first moment you go to their home page — from dead-end conversations, irrelevant updates, to application overload, here’s three ways to fix Facebook.
For many, Facebook is their window on the world. This I know — I have friends, family and clients who’re on Facebook many times during the day. OK, we accept Facebook is free, so we need to temper our ill tempers with that fact. That aside, there’s some major flaws in Facebook that need to be sorted out sooner rather than later.
Post share items to lists
The news feed is a mess that gets worse with every update; and it’s not like the guys behind Facebook aren’t aware their news feed is broken. The recent privacy updates just don’t mean a damn thing and are arguably more confusing than offering any remedial service.
I know I’ve covered the issue before, but we really do need a way to post shares to distinct groups of people. What’s the point of being able to create lists of people if I can’t post to those lists specifically?
There are things I want to share, but I know my nieces and nephews won’t care about. Similarly, I might be posting photos from a night out with friends that clients might not be interested in seeing either. So all we do is clutter each other’s news feeds, when a fix is a simple as being able to share to lists. It’s really that simple.
Filter applications by friend
So you’ve seen yet another shared item from someone on your news feed that you really don’t want to see. Perhaps it’s a game, or something else, like a geo-tagging service. Facebook gives us the option to either hide the application, or hide the person. But what if I want to hide the application only when posted by a particular person? That’s all I want to do.
Link shares together
So you share what you like, right? Of course you do. However, for people like me that have their Page on Facebook, we try to retain some kind of control over the conversations we start. Problem is, the moment someone shares something they’ve found on Facebook, a totally new conversation starts, with absolutely no relation to the source of the originating conversation — each new share is totally new, and all comments on the previous item are abandoned, or branched away from.
It’s all very Twitter-esque, in that the conversations are flat, with no way to see where it all began. What better way to connect with like-minded people than to have each share extend upon the original share, so we all see each other’s comments? And there’s me thinking Facebook was supposed to be a social network.
To me, these are the things I expect to see. They’re not unusual or weird, but the very basics of managing my social network in a meaningful way. What do you think? Perhaps you have your own missing Facebook feature…
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Not fun.
Unfortunately Facebook is down really often. Thanks for your tutorial!