December 19, 2010 The Next Big Facebook Change...They Should Do

I have come to grips that Facebook is now a staple. The OAuth integrations of allowing a single sign on type approach to websites, the population footprint that is using Facebook, and growing features to integrate the world, Facebook has done what MySpace did not. With all this advancement, Facebook has not addressed changing the core features of its purpose in life. The Friends system.

Right now your Friends are global. If they are a friend they can see everything. Yes you can go into the deep security settings of Facebook and prevent individuals from seeing or doing things, but it's at the individual level. If you have 400 friends that becomes a problem The more I read about people who get fired for posting something about their workplace, divorced, arrested and so on, aside from the need for more education on what Facebook does and how it works, but there needs to be a change fundamentally to how Friends are stored and used. It needs a classification system.

Here's what I would do if I was in any position of decision power at Facebook.

I would want to take on sites like LinkedIn, Flickr, Picasa, and other social networking sites. Primarily, LinkedIn would be my target. In order to do that you cannot have our business friends in the same pool as your BFFs that can see your rude and vulgar posts and pictures.You just can't, so you have guys like me who have a very limited Facebook Friend list and my business associates are on LinkedIn. I would like to bridge them but won't dare right now. Not so much for what I post but having no control over what others reply back. I also use Places and I don't necessarily want my boss or VPs to see that. I want to limit it easily and simply rather than one off, complicated settings to do it.

Here's what I would do, create Friend Groups. With that, change the security to set it up based on your Friend Groups. Think about it. If you have 200 friends, are they really all your friends or acquaintances? Do they are really need to see things you would only prefer your close circle to see and experience? Today, you can't do that at the granularity that you need to.

Off the top of my head I would have groups for these categories
- Friends Main (open as it is today)
- Classmates (people you used to know well, but not a close anymore)
- Co Workers (Your relationship is different, you may be friendly but not friends)
- Family (obvious omissions for this group)
- Acquaintances (people you meet at a bar, friends of friends, someone you know of)
- Business (very clear)

All of those groups are different enough here I would want some things only seen to sets of groups over others. You take that approach and Facebook now has just become a more diverse and flexible platform to take on and attract other users.

If they stick to the way they have it today, they will hit a wall and allow these other specifically targeted social networking sites to grow when people will realize they want to do less and less on Facebook.

I say embrace the user options and the use of Facebook will increase, I know I would welcome that.

BB - End of Line.



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