My Facebook Features Wish List

Everyday I use Facebook and everyday I find myself wanting just a few refinements to the current features. Nothing major (well, except the broken email system!), just certain things that would make my user experience more powerful, positive and productive.

Here’s my wish list of Facebook features,

(1) Radically improved email.

C’mon Facebook – don’t you know more and more people are using FB email as one of their *primary* mediums for communicating? I’d like:

• To create folders for sorting/archiving. (I know I can do this in Outlook with the email notifications. But Facebook email has the person’s profile pic filed with the message and I like that for reference.)
• To set up filters/rules so I can at least manage incoming email better.
• The ability to forward emails. T
• o be able to blind copy. (One of my peeves is those multiple-recipient spam emails!)
• The ability to unsubscribe/prevent getting email from specific people I don’t necessarily want to unfriend.

(2) More customizable News Feed.

I’ve played with those sliders on the news feed mixer board up the wazoo. I’ve got names in the “More About…” and “Less About…” fields. Yet I know there has to be room for improvement in Facebook’s algorithms. I *reeeeally* would like to refine the content further! Whatever happened to the little thumbs up and thumbs down in the News Feed?

And, just with ads by certain people (see #5), I’d like the ability to nix those same folks (the ones I blocked in particular) from my News Feed when I see events, groups, yada yada by/for/about them.

(Wondering what the heck I’m talking about re sliders, mixer board, more/less about? Scroll to the foot of your News Feed page and click on the link for Preferences. Voila!)

(3) Aggregate Mini Feed of top friends

Maybe there’s an app that does this? If you know of one, let me know! Here’s what I’d like to do: hand pick my shortlist of people I want to follow closely. Then pull their entire Mini Feed into an RSS reader with alerts for certain activities. Okay, dream on, I know!

My goal here is (a) not to miss anything important, (b) tone down the “noise,” and (c) zero in on specific friends and specific activities without having to look at a batch of profiles one by one (not that I do much of that right now!). Make sense?

I already know you can subscribe to any or all of your friends’ Status Updates, Notes and/or Posted Items RSS feed. However, it’s just as easy to look on FB or use the Firefox FB toolbar, for example, for Status Updates.

(4) Ignore all Events, Groups.

I use the “ignore all” button every day to clean out all the extraneous invitations. However, just as you can ignore all APP invites from certain friends, I’d like to see that feature added for Group invites and Event invites.

(5) Lift the limit on Group messaging.

Yep, this is a tricky one because if ever Facebook lifts the current 1,200 limit, the spammy-type folks would abuse the feature up the wazoo. However, what if there was a qualifying procedure? Accumulate so many points, go through a peer-review, get x number of endorsements. That type of thing. Food for thought. Meantime, Facebook Pages are the only place with no ceiling.

(6) Send Page Updates to Inboxes.

This is contingent upon my wish #1 above because I’d probably filter to a specified folder. 😉 I don’t know about you, but I rarely check my Page Updates. I might if they came into my Inbox just like Group emails.

(7) Block certain ads.

I really don’t mind the ads on the left hand side, the bottom and in my News Feeds. But there are times when I see an ad from a person I’ve blocked on Facebook and I just want to be able to gratifyingly click a big black “x” and get rid of that ad. Okay, okay, I’m moving on. LOL.

Actually, I recently started noticing ads that have clearly accessed my YEAR of birth. Now that *ticks me off* as I have my year of birth hidden for privacy (identity protection) reasons, not because I care that you know my age. Seeing an ad with “41 Year Old Female” or “Women Over 40” in the headline also makes me want to click a big black “x” and get rid of that ad!! PLUS, it makes me question Facebook’s privacy settings and what info they’re revealing to advertisers.

That’s it! Just seven wee adjustments please, pretty please?! Ha! (Yeah, hm, so much for “nothing major.”)

Oh, I could easily add an 8th wish and that’d be: A *much* better way to display all my fave apps on ONE page and not have to fight for valuable real estate on my shrunk down profile. However, I know Facebook are working away behind the scenes on their super-duper new and improved Tabbed Profiles coming out next month. Fingers crossed we like ’em! 🙂

What about you? Which refinements would make all the difference to your user experience on Facebook?

Mari Smith

Often referred to as “the Queen of Facebook,” Mari Smith is widely known as the Premier Facebook Marketing Expert and a top Social Media Thought Leader. Forbes describes Mari as, “… the preeminent Facebook expert. Even Facebook asks for her help.” IBM named Mari as one of seven women that are shaping digital marketing. Mari is an in-demand keynote speaker, corporate social media strategist, dynamic live webcast host, and popular brand ambassador. She is coauthor of Facebook Marketing: An Hour A Day, and author of The New Relationship Marketing.

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