Facebook For Professionals: Information Output Management Becomes Cleaner, but What About Input?

Facebook launched a feature today that allows users to create an “extended profile.” So far as I can tell, this profile is a no-man’s land where Facebookers can put profile boxes of applications that they are bored with but can’t bear to actually remove.

The upside of this is that my profile is much cleaner. It actually looks like something you’d find on Facebook — as opposed to, say, MySpace.

Facebook has been doing a lot recently to give users control over their outputs. Making lists of your friends will — someday soon, we hope — give users customized control over the types of content their different friends have access to.

But it’s equally, if not more important that users have control over their content inputs. Facebook has lately become a jumble of sponsored announcements, badly targeted advertising, unwanted application requests and group spam. The tools they give you to make sense of, categorize, manage and store all of this content are sub-optimal at best.

I’d like to see Facebook implement five input management features in the next few months:

1. A tagging interface so that users can build a folksonomy around content. User-generated tags could drive content specificity as well. I’d love to be able to tell them that I’d like to see more stories about politics in my news feed and fewer stories about television shows. These preferences could be used to drive advertising
2.  Separating my news feed out by friend lists. I’d like to have one news feed for my high school and college friends, another for my professional contacts and yet another for people I’m currently hanging out with. If Facebook wants to be the dashboard for my life, they’ll need to give me the opportunity to compartmentalize my inputs just like I do in real life.
3. Let me say “no more application invites.” I’m pretty proactive about seeking out the Facebook applications that add value to my life. I usually find them on my friend’s profile pages or in my news feed. I don’t want my friends to invite me to any more applications. I know that some think this feature would significantly throttle the platform, but I argue that people who would flip the switch to turn off app invites aren’t adding new applications anyway. The impact would probably be less than some people think.
4. Better e-mail management. Facebook e-mail is broken. It’s just, broken. I get looped in on group e-mails and the next thing I know, I get every reply. I can’t loop new people in on a conversation. I can’t export my messages anywhere. I can’t save them to a folder. I can’t categorize them.
5. Separate shared items from messages. When someone shares a link with me privately, it comes into my inbox. I’d like a separate inbox just for content spitting.

What input management features would you like to see?

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