Facebook: What it is and what I want it to be.
It was this very month, in fact this very week of May when Facebook was opened up to my university among others in the UK. Judging from my profile ID (223400006) I’d like to think I was #6 to sign up. Facebook has changed immensely since, and not always for the good. From opening up to general public to releasing the Application Platform, an old school user (I’m not talking about me) wouldn’t recognise the Facebook he/she saw today from the one back then. However this isn’t a post to bitch about ‘features’ I dislike. Instead I’ll talk about where I see Facebook headed, or want to see it headed.
As it stands now, Facebook is pretty popular Social networking platform. I have all my friends on here and I can see what they have been upto in a variety of ways. Their photos, reading their walls, their notes (blog posts), events they are attending and most importantly status updates. I can find out common interests too by looking at their profile or the outlandish groups they join. Communication is done via public wall posts or Messaging, which Facebook hopes will replace email but more on that later.
The two communication methods were highly ineffective for any real time communication simply because of the time delay involved. And then to use an additional IM service with all friends there was unnecessary duplication of information. Facebook chat aims to resolve and rightly so. The point where other IM providers (MS, Yahoo, etc.) have failed is that they tried to build a social network around an IM platform which is the wrong approach. IM, however important is only a branch of a user’s online networking tree. Facebook is finally expected to announce Jabber support sometime today. What this means for the average user is that multiplatform IM clients like Pidgin, Trillian etc will bring your Facebook contact list to your desktop, a la conventional applications (MSN and Yahoo Messengers). Also many applications will be able to send notifications to these applications, but I’m not sure if that’s a good thing. Nonetheless it’s a great move forward.
Facebook has long pushed for Messaging (Inbox) to replace the use of email. This however is far from being achieved for a variety of reasons. Firstly, email itself is broken. Ask anyone who gets a considerable amount of (non junk) email and will tell you there is a serious need for a way to organise the information overload that is email. Secondly, the Messaging service is really substandard on Facebook. It was only recently that Facebook allowed searching of older messages.
Truth be told Facebook can be a brilliant platform for resolving a sizable chunk of communication needs. In order to do that Facebook needs to move from the web to the desktop territory. I know a lot of people will disagree with me as it is the complete opposite of the whole Web 2.0 ‘phenomenon’ everyone is suffering from. In my opinion web apps cannot completely replace the nativity of desktop applications.
The way I imagine it, I want to see Facebook offering a full fledged desktop solution. I want it to have a complete contact management feature which will allow me to see my Friends’ data from the computer in an offline environment. I want to be able to chat to all my friends without having to login to a website or keep my browser window open. I want to have all my events available on my computer as well as be able to add events/meetings/appointments which aren’t uploaded online. Most importantly, I want to help Facebook replace email with Messaging but that will only be done if it is accessible and archive-able without the need to log in.
Come to think of it, what I have described is really a solution for my problem of complete Outlook and Facebook synchronization with elimination of data duplication and the continual availability of all information in the cloud as well to ensure portability.
In my mind it’s a great idea. Either that, or I’m just a 20 year old student wasting time away on yet another academically unproductive night.
Tags: email, facebook, instant messaging