Having fiddled around with the new Facebook redesign and timeline, I can say there are four immediate change I hope to see implemented soon. Hate the redesign or love it, whatever, but the first two here I think are pretty major privacy issues.
Whether you think these or other changes should happen, you can always tell FB through their Suggestion and Feedback page in the Help Center. Or tweet at them. Don’t update your status. Only your friends see you whining then.
1. Make a privacy option to add a new friend as a “new” friend
This option would show them only new posts, not posts/updates/photos that existed before you became “friends” with them. The addition of the timeline makes this especially important.
In real life, a friend you just made is not going to know or understand your life for the past five years. As is, becoming Facebook “friends” with someone I just met will give them the ability to basically browse my past.
If I have grown up or changed a lot since starting my Facebook account, I probably won’t want new friends seeing what I did when I was 16 or 21. Likewise, I may want or not want my high school friends to be able to look back to see what I was like then.
This should be able to be turned off, in the case that say, an old friend or family member makes a Facebook account, or you want to share your past with a new close friend/significant other. Thus you would have a new “old” or “close” friend.
Facebook gives a very artificial and uncomfortable look at someone’s life and past. My family uses Facebook for updates about my brother’s soccer game or pictures of the family dog. I don’t want to hand permission to eavesdrop on my life to someone I just met, even if would like to stay in contact with later.
2. Make privacy options for whole days, months or years within the timeline
There needs to be a privacy option to hide (or even delete) an entire month or year within your timeline, hiding it from everyone, certain lists, or possibly even yourself. Right now, it seems you must edit the timeline by individual post. This is very tedious, difficult, and prone to error.
Someone may have gone through an awkward year, a month of depression, or a prolonged break-up that is reflected in his or her timeline. Maybe there are posts from the worst day of your life that you hope to never see. Allowing old or new friends to see those posts could be very distressing or even damaging. Forcing users to relive those months or years by individually changing the privacy options could also be very painful to the user.
There needs to be an option to easily decide:
- “I personally don’t want to see anything from [month/year].”
- ”I only want family to see my awkward teen years.”
- ”I want to keep [month/year] private in my timeline for personal reference, but I don’t want anyone else to see it.”
Makes sense right? A drop-down privacy option box to the right of the months/years within the timeline and also in the right sidebar would do the trick. Perhaps there should be a calendar-type option that you can pick the days, months or years you want to see or you want other people to see.
3. Make the whole timeline optional
Maybe I’m just not nostalgic enough to care what I ate for lunch three years ago. I have enough self-importance to think at least 10 people might care enough to hit a “like” button on a picture of my lunch today. But not enough self-importance to want a timeline of every status update and post, so I and other can like our past lunch photos.
A timeline is the kind of thing there would be a million app updates from people in my news feed and I would block the app. I don’t care.
The timeline does seem disorganized at first glance, as the posts flanking either side of the line doesn’t “read” as well as I’d like.
I liked the wall, but I can get over calling it a timeline if that’s what Facebook wants to do. It’s kinda pretty. But in a scrapbook way. I don’t use Facebook because I need a scrapbook. If anything, I have plenty of photo albums on FB already for that and I had no problem getting to them already.
4. Please, just make search capabilities
Even with the timeline giving me every wall post since I started my account, I still have to browse my timeline to look stuff up.
Sometimes I do care about being able to look up the name of that restaurant I went to, when I met a certain friend or that funny thing someone posted on my wall two years ago. Status updates tell me that, but I don’t need them memorialized on my profile. I just want a search bar in my timeline to find stuff.
Google, that’s what you’re good at. Get on that for Google+.
