Improve Facebook by providing Posting Categories and Filters

Note: This was originally published within Facebook sometime during April/May 2011. If you would like to join this ‘cause’ here is the link:

http://www.causes.com/causes/610326?recruiter_id=126569555

Social Networking sites are exciting indeed, no doubt. However, in some cases people spend way too much time in these that they forget real world.

Of course, no one is forcing them to use it all day, however I feel that even the site owners have moral responsibility in designing these sites so that user's time is not unnecessarily wasted. Considering millions of people accessing these sites, any time saved by users would be a great return of productive time back to the world.

Facebook has some cool features, but I find it too difficult to keep up with the updates - volume is very high. Many a times, I felt that the purpose is defeated, I am missing out many genuine, serious updates from my friends which get lost in between all the fun stuff that is shared and unwanted facebook updates (ex: the classic one - x is now friends with y)

Here is a suggestion to facebook - I hope facebook considers this and implements for the benefit of everyone:

1. When people post something, give them an option to select one of the following categories:

- Personal Update

- General Discussion

- Fun Stuff

2. When we see the news feed, give us an option to apply filter so that we can select only "Personal Update" if we want.

Pros:
- Busy people will not miss personal updates from their friends

- People who have more time anyway will go and see rest of the stuff too

Cons:
- A second or two to select category while posting, perhaps!

Additional points:

- Above options need not be mandatory to begin with, it can be optional. But I am sure people will realize its value and start using them very soon.

- By default you can show all the stuff. People who want to see only personal updates won't mind an extra step of applying filter as soon as they login.

Please share your thoughts on this and suggest any refinements to this.

Regards,
Krishna.

1. Having connection with 100s is important, but we cannot browse through 100s of messages in the newsfeed, not all are equally important

2. Numerous not-so-important messages make us miss some important updates shared by our friends

3. I believe introducing posting categories and filters as explained below would save millions of productive human hours