Many of Facebook’s more than 1 billion monthly active users would agree — the site is great, but could use some improvement. As users complain about ads, a cluttered and confusing interface, and several other things, there are a few things that Facebook could implement to make the site much more palatable. Here are five innovations (some possible, some rather imaginative) that we think would improve Facebook.
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Facebook announced Tuesday that the application modules it introduced for Timeline in March have now been rolled out to all users, encouraging app developers in a post on its developer blog to incorporate these sections into their apps
Odds are, if you’ve connected with an application on Facebook, you’ve seen the familiar warning that it can post to your Timeline and on friends’ News Feeds on your behalf. There’s a way you can go back and fix this through the activity log, so the app’s activity can only be seen by you. You can also remove the app if you don’t want it to have access to your profile anymore.
One of the leading minds behind Facebook’s mobile-first push is leaving the company. TechCrunch reported that Rasmus Andersson, Facebook’s lead mobile designer, has taken a job at Dropbox, working with the design and engineering teams.
Facebook appears to be tinkering with more ways to enable users to discover and listen to music via the social network. Following the discovery of a “listen using MySpace” button earlier this week, a News Feed story from music application Spotify offered users the option to “listen later.”
Facebook introduced its listen button for musical artists’ pages last April, and last September, former social network juggernaut MySpace announced the ability for its users to sign in using Facebook or Twitter. Now, it appears that those two features are intertwined for some users, as Blink Account Manager Hagar Refael spotted the option to “listen using MySpace” when hovering over the listen button on the Facebook page for musician Steve Aoki.
BandsInTown, the top concert-discovery application on Facebook, plans to deepen integration within the social network. The app, which reaches more than 20 million unique Facebook users per month, wants to connect more fans through concerts they’re planning to see. BandsInTown CEO Julien Mitelberg spoke with AllFacebook about how the app will use open graph technology to make Facebook users more aware of events featuring their favorite artists.
Facebook has been experimenting with ways that allow users to be more expressive — such as structured status updates and more info in the “about” section. The social network Friday announced new open graph actions that let people tell a little more about what they’ve done through Facebook-connected applications.
What changes to its news feed will Facebook unveil at its press event Thursday at its headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif.? According to a Facebook employee, a social advertising industry source, and developers who spoke with TechCrunch, the big announcement involves new ways for users to filter their news feeds.
Facebook is moving to position itself as the hub of all interest-based communities (Pinterest, Spotify, Foodspotting, and Goodreads, for example) with its open graph platform. The people we follow in these networks are not necessarily our friends, but people whose content interests us. At the end of the day, all of these communities are peer-to-peer. Facebook can reimagine two big peer-to-peer markets with real identity, discovery, and imitation enabled by open graph at the center.
