I read “Facebook is doomed” post every week

Every week there is at least one post about how Facebook has become too bloated and why or how people are leaving Facebook or why it has become too crowded. Today I read this pretty good post on The Verge which sums up the problems really well.

When it comes to the bottom line the problem it’s basically how news feed is too cluttered with unrelated posts and how to make the right stories pop up on the news feed.

Facebook is something more important to users than Twitter, Facebook is more personal where Twitter is mostly public rant. So I think a reverse chronological order timeline is not a good option. Even if you miss a Tweet you won’t mind about it because there is a high chance that it’s something unimportant and you might see the same story from another user Tweeting about it especially if it’s related to news. So it’s important to have a newsfeed that is generated by an algorithm.

But in Facebook you can’t miss a good update because they are mostly personal updates (life events) and they are important to friends even though they don’t interact very often on Facebook. However the problem has been for Facebook is figuring out what are the important posts and what are not. This is more important to users that have large number of friends in their friends list.

Currently Facebook is showing more posts from the people that you interact with the most, like from people that you chat often, from people that you liked or commented on their previous posts.

I think the problem is that just because you interact with them the most doesn’t mean that you want to see their every post or their every post is important to you. Life event from a person that you rarely interact might be more important than a post from a game from a person that you frequently interact

I think Facebook has to find more fine balance between what is important (posts) and who are important (people) to a user at a particular given time.

Plus I think the posts that we are currently seeing on our news feeds discourage further organic sharing, it doesn’t encourage you to share important personal things, it encourages us to share more cat photos and memes.

I think one way to improve Facebook is to add tabs to the news-feed. What if it has a news-feed that we have today, then a next tab that says “photos” when clicked it will show a news feed only with photos posted by friends. Then another tab called “links”, for posts by pages a tab called “pages”, another tab for status updates, and so on. This might add some improvement to the clutter filled news feed that we have today. This must not be small links like these on the side bar but adding big tabs to the top of the current news-feed. Which will basically give multiple news-feeds filled with different kinds of content.

Also another way is to give more priority to the things that friends post on Facebook by themselves rather than shares and reshares from some other profile or from a Facebook page. This will encourage users for more organic sharing from their own profiles.

Plus when adding a friend on Facebook encourage users to add priority or rank how important the they are to the user might also be a good option.

Still don’t think Facebook is completely doomed but if they don’t act quickly they might eventually become like Yahoo, big company not very useful.