Thursday, June 30, 2011

Facebook and my rant

I've been using Facebook for 6 months. There are two irritating issues that I met every time I use it.

One - I have little control of how my posts reach my audience. I have friends, co-workers, relatives, and direct family members all on Facebook. Whenever I want to post something I have to be very careful about what I'm gonna say. Because after you post it, every friend (in Facebook all contacts are considered to be friends) will see it. It isn't that I will say something offensive. Sometimes I just want to target a smaller group of audience. Won't it be nice to have something similar to Email's contact groups? Organize your contacts into different groups, e.g. co-workers and families. When you post, you can choose which groups to target. This introduced a lot of flexibility and also removed some unnecessary privacy confusions. This issue is about sending posts. My 2nd issue is about receiving posts.

I 'Liked' WSJ and since then I started to receive posts from that channel. The posts are actually interesting. The problem is it's just too many of them, and they started to polluting my news feed page. I didn't find an obvious way to manage these posts. Maybe I should look further. But won't it be great to have a simple filter mechanism? Users can define filters that automatically route posts from specific sources to user's predefined 'folders'. Like 'rules' in Outlook or 'smart filters' in Gmail.

The core of Facebook is graphs of nodes which communicate to each other. How to make the communication more effective and intuitive should be Facebook's highest priority to concern. Don't you think?

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