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Last blog post of the quarter. Thanks to the fellow students that read my comics and blog posts! I hope you guys continue to come back to Herogirl 🙂
Overall, I think I’m pretty satisfied with the features Facebook does have. Without maybe some serious research, I’d be hard pressed to find any features to add. However — and I’m sure I speak for most people — there are things I think Facebook could do without. The following list is mostly made up of demands for Facebook to do things differently, rather than additional features.
- The ability to remove yourself from being found. So maybe you have a Facebook to stay in touch with a few close friends or family, and you’re pretty satisfied with your social circle online. You don’t feel to need to add new people as friends. But what happens if some lady you randomly met at a luncheon yesterday wants to friend you on Facebook? I’m sure you’d rather not let her see your embarrassing photos or silly wall posts, but it’s awkward knowing that that person is wondering why you haven’t accepted their friend request yet. Though there is a setting to remove you from the Facebook search engine, I don’t think there’s a way to hide things like the wall posts you’ve made on other people’s pages.
- Prevent Facebook games from posting to your feed or wall, or sending you requests. Please. Please make this a setting. Maybe you play Facebook games and you like knowing how your friends are doing on Farmville. But if you’re like me, you don’t care — at all.
- Photo tags have to be approved. Why should anyone be able to post stuff about you without permission? I guess it’s one thing if someone writes a post about you, but preventing unwanted photo tags seems like it should be pretty easy to implement.
- Filter chain mail messages. Okay, so maybe auto-banning-for-life someone who posts chain mail messages is harsh, but at least, maybe there could be a filter for such silly nonsense. It’s sorta like if the universe had prevented the Ring tape from being made in the first place. There’d be no need to pass it on, and the world would be so much happier.
- File sharing. I guess this is something Facebook could add. Even if it’s in the spirit of email + attachment. I think this is the one thing that’s preventing people from using Facebook as a collaboration tool!
- Calendar/Scheduler. Okay, I lied. This is a second thing preventing people from using Facebook as a collaboration tool.
- Prevent stupid statuses from showing up on your news feed. But then we wouldn’t have Failbook!
1. Yes there is! I’ve seen people with the setting before; it makes their comment visible as a blank avatar and an un-clickable name. xD You can also lock status messages so only your friends can see them, and not your friends’ friends.
2. Block an application and it auto-blocks all invites and updates. B)
3. I don’t know about preventing, but if someone makes one, it’s pretty easy to remove the tag. If the friend refuses to take down the photo, photoshop their face on porn stars and tag them everywhere in revenge.
4. That’s the internet for you.
5. Illegal file sharing is such a touchy thing, I can see facebook wanting to stay the hell away from it. |:
6. …I SWORE THEY HAD SOMETHING LIKE THIS but I think it was an application. I remember a thousand people asking me via something called “My Calendar!” if they could add my birthday… it was so annoying, I blocked it. |:
7. …but aren’t stupid statuses the point of Facebook? xD
Sarah! You have re-invented Facebook for me.
I love your comment to #3, hahaha.
I love your comics! Herogirl is awesome.
I agree with everything you mentioned except for #6. I think the problem with a calendar/scheduler is that it makes the role of a Facebook stalker much to easy. It could make reckless people even more vulnerable to being stalked in real life. I think there are Facebook applications that enable you to show your course schedule to people who see your profile. But they’re not made by Facebook, and I suspect Facebook might not want to get involved in making something like it because of liability issues.
#1 through #4 should be very easy to implement, perhaps even trivial. Well, okay, the database work involved in some cases might be a bit of a pain.
#5 is one of those “not with a ten-foot pole” issues, and it would presumably require a massive expansion in storage capacity and related infrastructure. Short version, it’s a lot of hassle with no margin in it for them. On the other hand, it could be further developed in a way which makes all of these points moot.
#6 would involve a fair amount of work, but it’s a well-known problem with a number of off-the-shelf drop-in solutions which would mainly need customization. And it’s something that’s clearly missing from the Facebook equation. Honestly, I have no idea why they don’t have something like this yet. Well, people would probably annoy the hell out of each other with it…but since when has that stopped Facebook from doing anything?
#7, the main problem here is that computers don’t understand meaning. On the other hand, you have so many users running around on Facebook posting stupid statuses that you could probably hash together a 98% effective implementation fairly easily by a combination of keyword blacklisting and case-by-case block flagging. From there, you can start running vector comparisons over the blocked statuses and probably end up with an extremely effective “automatic” algorithm after the fact. Short version, crowd-source the job of teaching the filter to the hordes of Facebook users.
I have strong agreements on your #1 and #3. It’s definitely true that some of the users just want to keep a small but intimate private space with familiar people. #3 is quite important since some people would manipulate with pictures by viciously tagging the others with irrelevant images. And the function of approving for tags also protect privacy for users who just want to stay away from sight of the public. For #6, admittedly I would love to have this application since there will be more resources for me. However, people using this function may easily violate some regulations on copyright. So it’s probably not that easy to carry out.
Your comic raises an important idea: the first users of a site will likely be the friends of the inventor! However, I don’t think that the general public would be too eager to sign up for a completely new service when Facebook is so entrenched. In a social networking service, the social network is the most important marketing feature: if your friends are using it, you’ll want to use it too.
All of those features sound pretty neat! I agree that Facebook could become much more than a “face book” — I think the idea is to (generally) leave it to third-party app developers to make that happen. I would personally like to see much more than a calendar — I’d like Google Apps, etc. to be integrated with Facebook. Then, it would be a snap to edit and share documents with Facebook groups. I suppose that’s what you mean by “file sharing”, except a bit more limited — you can’t upload just anything (which could prevent infringement claims, etc.).
i agree with all points, especially #5 and #6. facebook has the potential to revolutionize the way we share content and collaborate on projects, but this is limited to third party apps that don’t cooperate and users are reluctant to install. i think more built-in features are necessary and would be easy to implement. also agree with jeff’s point that google apps should be seamlessly integrated with facebook.
I like herogirlcomics,
It’s exciting makes me feel ursh
HEHE