facebook’s bloat reminds me of “portals” in 1999- i understand that they want people to spend every single minute on facebook, but shit, this is the web; there is zero cost to going to a different site or even having a tab with both open.
Features which are inherent to facebook
pictures – “face”
the wall -”book”
profile pages
Features which are useful but not necessary
events
groups
fan pages
Features that are tacked on to keep people on the site to expose them to ads – what should be done instead
chat – link to IM
games – link to games
private messaging – link to email
facebook has some incredibly valuable data about their users, and almost all of that comes from their “core features” the social network and the data supplied by the users.
what id really like to see is facebook make their core feature – social management – work better.
FOR EXAMPLE:
when you click on a link on a friend’s page – lets say under “music” they have sigur ros. If facebook were really about building and maintaining your social networks, wouldn’t the most useful response be to show your other friends that have the same interest?
But thats not what happens. rather, it goes to a listing of all the related groups and fan pages. I list something like a hundred bands that I like, but I’m not a member of any of their “groups” – i just list them as interests.
Here’s a more specific example – lets say youve got friends all over the place – college buddies, work friends, and so forth. while you like all of them, you dont want to be inviting people with whom you went to high school to an event across the country from them.
Yet, on event or group invitation pages, you can only filter your friends by network; not even by location, but network – a vestigial feature from facebook’s college days that has been officially deprecated and is essentially irrelevant today.
And finally, sometimes you might want to privately tag people with data that they would not want to post themselves – maybe you have some friends that like getting baked and some that are straight-edge, or two people in the same clique that don’t get along. it would be quite useful if you could make note of that and at least have facebook alert you of potential conflicts – sort of like a platonic dating service – but apparently supporting FarmVille was a higher priority.
mandatory disclaimer:
of course, facebook is apparently worth billions, so who am I to tell them what to do.