Vimoh's Blog

Facebook is high on functionality but rather low on accessibility. The recent redesign opens up a lot of possibilities for the service to make sure some of its best features come to the fore, thereby enhancing the whole Facebook experience.

I will try to list a few things they might want to do to make this happen.

Facebook Notes

The notes feature is one of the less-pimped features of Facebook. Most people’s Facebook notes only comprise of imported RSS feeds. I remember a discussion on Friendfeed (this was soon after the launch of Friendfeed’s realtime interface) where someone said the only thing missing was a means to do long-form blogging.

Facebook has always had this feature. But they need to play it up more. Perhaps it can be included in the list of things you can do with the new publisher tool? What’s more? You can upload notes from m.facebook.com as well. In my experience, notes can be a solid replacement for web journals, especially if you want to keep your posts within friends.

Email Posting

Facebook’s mobile site is among the best there are. But it doesn’t allow for posting of pictures. The only way I can post photos to my Facebook albums from my mobile is by MMS (an across the world, inter-continental MMS at that). Apart from being unreliable and slow, it is also costly.

Facebook should allow for posting of photos to the wall via email. While they are at it, they should also let me post notes by email.

More Feed Filters

I love the new live feed that has Facebook users across the world crying in anguish. I think it is a step in the right direction. But it needs to become more flexible. Facebook’s vast range of applications can make this feed richer than Twitter’s or Friendfeed’s can ever be. They should allow for EVERY type of item to show up on this feed. They should also allow the users to determine what they want to show in their personal feeds and what they don’t.

Currently there are only two options — either put up with someone’s updates, or ban them altogether.

Vanity URLs for Profiles

It is possible (and fashionable) for people to carry their Twitter URLs around in their heads, on their visiting cards or even in their heads (so they can shoot unsuspecting strangers with it). With Facebook, the only way I can tell someone about my profile is by giving him my email and/or asking him to search for me.

A simple URL like facebook.com/user or user.facebook.com or even facebook.com/members/pages/user will go a long way in opening Facebook up.

Tagging Users with Ease

One important factor behind the success of any publishing system is its ability to reach out to prospective readers. Newspapers advertised, blog posts linked and tracked back to other blog posts, Twitter lets users tag each other using a simple @username command. On Facebook notes, the tagging process is much less intuitive. True, photos and notes can be tagged. But tagging someone while writing a note is not possible.

If Facebook does go for vanity URLs, usernames might help in this regard. A @username or a #username might be converted into a link to the user’s profile.

A mega wall?

A large part of Twitter’s appeal lies in the tracking that their search service allows. Anything you can spell, you can track. The ‘trending topics’ section is a virtual heatmap of what theworld is talking about, right now. Facebook’s opening up its status message stream won’t do much good unless these little bits of text become part of a greater whole, like they did when Facebook tied up with CNN to broadcast President Obama’s swearing-in ceremony. Millions logged in and shared their thoughts on the historic moment.

It is that kind of global participation that I am talking about. And why only global? Why not local events? Why not allow uses to create pages to carry out live discussions on specific events and topics. On Twitter, all this requires is a hashtag. On Facebook…?