Facebook thoughts

September 13th, 2007

Now that Facebook is growing by astonishing numbers, I think it is time to consider what they are doing. Facebook created the Facebook Platform to give developers the ability to create applications within the Facebook system. First off, I think this was genius. As any forward thinking company should do, you have to realize that internal innovation and development is limited. While you may have really intelligent people working for you, it does not compare to the masses. Just think of Wikipedia. So what they have basically done is give the power to the people and are basically getting free functionality by doing this.

Although I think this is a good idea, some people don’t think so. They believe, as I sometimes do, that by allowing anyone to develop applications for Facebook, that they are becoming Myspace. The reason I disagree with this is that it is much more controlled than Myspace. However, some people do enjoy cramming every type of application possible on their profile which gives me somewhat of a headache when trying to look through. So how could Facebook solve this problem?

I believe the solution to the problem is Facebook pages. Since Facebook wants to become the one stop shop for many of your needs, it makes no sense to cram all that onto one page. I think they should create the ability for users to add multiple pages where each page can contain different information. You can almost compare it to a normal website with the different sections for “About Me”, “Contact Us”, etc. By allowing this, you allow users to actually organize their information.

The next question is, given this ability, will users actually organize their information in a decent way? Probably not. Seeing the way some create their profiles now, it is pretty painful on the eyes. But, you could allow developers to set defaults for each application that could determine where the application will go. If it is a photo application, it could go on your photo page. A wall or similar application could go on a communication or contact page. There are many details that I will not go into, but in general I believe that it could really clean up a Facebook profile. Also, sense Facebook really wants to go to the next level of connecting people, I believe this or something similar will have to be done as it grows and the applications increase.

2 Responses to “Facebook thoughts”

  1. trent Says:

    I completely agree. Facebook is far more controlled than Myspace, but they do need some type of paging or organization for their growing features. Maybe pages isnt the answer, but there are so many other possibilties with javascript these days to do some pretty innovative things with data(tabs, accordians, modals, etc..). I’m starting to miss the old clean, simple facebook of last year.

  2. bryanware.com » Blog Archive » Facebook listens Says:

    […] Facebook reads my blog since they went off and did this.  Posted by bware Filed in […]

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