Filed under: Design, Social Software, web 2.0
Facebook answers users' layout concerns with new features
The upcoming features are centered around giving you more control over what you see in your activity stream. For example, autoupdating is coming back (as an optional feature) and the ability to filter out noisy apps is being introduced. Facebook is also considering decreasing the amount of one-to-one messages -- like people's wall posts to one another -- that show up in your stream, in favor of things that are more generally relevant. My personal favorite feature on Facebook's to-do list is adding tagged photos of your friends to the stream.
Since we got so much great feedback last time, let's open this up to the readers. Take this poll and let us know which of Facebook's announced improvements is your favorite, or whether they're all just hopeless.
I don't know if this is a labor of love or merely the brainchild of four very gifted games designers, but Level Up is a really weird mash-up of gaming elements that you have probably never seen in a Flash game before.
Let's start with the premise itself: Groundhog Day meets Memento. The game experience revolves around 'days': you explore the world and the clock slowly ticks towards the evening. You bounce around picking up gems and talking to the denizens of 'Level Upland'. Eventually you feel tired and head back to ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
El Taco said 10:25AM on 3-25-2009
I never thought it was that bad in the first place, but IMO these don't make it any better.
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dave said 11:03AM on 3-25-2009
I can't believe they didn't mention/aren't bringing back (at least yet) "Who's friending who"
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NikolaGo said 11:04AM on 3-25-2009
I never thought it was bad in the first place also, but then it started. My God it was horrible. The endless spam of shitapps, quizes, polls and whatever not started and there was NO WAY to be stopped.
Not by Facebook anyway (hello http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/44459 ). That's what kept me and still keeping me away from Facebook until they fix it, if... So it's obviously that my vote goes to better control/filtering for application.
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burnblue said 11:16AM on 3-25-2009
Not good enough. The previous setup worked, and here's why.
There was a News Feed, a Live Feed, and the other tabs (status, photos, etc). They had a very good algorithm for the News Feed that showed me what was relevant to me, and I could switch to the Live Feed when I wanted to see every update in real-time. For the News Feed, Facebook recognized when I've been communicating with a certain friend a lot, and shows me more about them, etc... plus we had the sliders for 'More or Less about this person' or 'More or Less of this application'. (Now we only have an X to hide the person out right).
The list filters can't accomplish the same thing.. they take a lot of work to maintain and can't do the fine-tuned things the algorithm did. We should give us back a default automatic filter, separate from the real time filter, separate from our custom lists. Right now, the Highlights are useless, the Feed is overwhelming, and the Filters are anemic.
This is besides the fact that the design (font choices, differentiation, widths, etc) was a significant step backwards.
It's as if a whole different team of developers was behind this redesign, when you compare it to the very useful features we were given 6 months ago. This time they took away, and added nothing.
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Taai said 11:17AM on 3-25-2009
This feature looks almost like Twitter
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Miguel said 11:56AM on 3-25-2009
I gave up on facebook a long time ago. It's to invasive.
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Casey said 1:18AM on 3-28-2009
By trying to go single stream, with no weighting, they turned it into a glorified twitter... I liked having my groups and fan page updates seperate from my friends activities... and I hate having to decide whether or not I ever want to see a certain persons updates just because they happen to be clogging up my current home page...
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