Ideas for Facebook

Posted: 2009-01-01

I originally thought of these for Orkut, but given that it still sucks with no sign of being ready to implement any of the dramatic changes necessary to make it as good as it could be, i decided Facebook is a lot closer (although not necessarily close) to hearing out these ideas. These could actually work for any social network or even just be created by application developers.

  1. Friend groups
    Wouldn't it be neat to have a group dedicated to each user, and have all their friends be members? There could even be the option to make a post hidden from the person the group is dedicated to (and you could then, for example, plan a surprise party for them). People might be too paranoid for something like this, or maybe it could be abused, but i thought it was an interesting new idea to consider, and in testing it could be an optional feature.
  2. Wiki profiles
    So i started thinking, what if  the Wikimedia Foundation created a separate project just for personal biographies? Then i thought, what if Wikipedia could get into social networking by doing something that's never been done before-- letting your profile be created by your friends? Maybe Wikimedia won't do this, but social networking sites could enable an alternate (optional?) profile for this. This could actually just be a part of the "friend groups" idea. It could be an alternative wiki-style profile that comes with a group dedicated to you. It'd be interesting to see how friends describe you collaboratively.
  3. Listed Interest GroupsTo reduce the number of pointless groups that have no real purpose other than to attract users under a common interest such as chocolate, for example, items listed under forms like "interests", "activities", etc. could, instead of just listing those that share the same interest, put them all into a special kind of group. Groups like this one, "Chocolate", on Orkut with over 610,000 members, and this one, "Chocolate = Love", on Facebook with over 105,000 members, really don't need to exist. Facebook's "Pages" feature almost addresses this issue, but the pages are just feeds with a wall and not groups.