Facebook Profiles and the News Feed

Richard McManus has a post at ReadWriteWeb on the declining significance of profile pages on Facebook.  This is as good a jumping off point as any for a post I’ve been wanting to write about what I consider a missed opportunity for Facebook.  But first, a little background from McManus:

As Facebook becomes more and more popular, the social network giant is putting more emphasis on the real-time feed. In other words, the activities of your friends displayed in reverse chronological order on your Facebook homepage. In the old days of Facebook – and indeed traditionally with social networks like MySpace and Friendster – you’d visit a person’s profile page to see what they’re up to. Facebook changed this paradigm in September 2006, when it introduced the news feed as the primary way to keep track of your friends. In October 2009, that feature was re-named the “live feed” and Facebook introduced a more filtered news feed for your homepage.

Now on to my gripe…*

It’s easy to imagine why Facebook would want to push the feed.  The more often content is updated, the more often you’re likely to check the site.  When a huge percentage of the site’s content is relatively static – profile pages – there is less reason to visit.

Yet, profile pages were central to users’ conception of the site.  This may explain at least a small part of the anger over the introduction of the News Feed and the more recent “Connections”.

And my feed on Facebook is pretty uninteresting.  Though Facebook has taken some steps to improve the relevance of the feed, there’s more work to be done.

Which is why I wish they’d built the feed around the existing structure of the profile.  Facebook already had divided my life up into a surprisingly useful, yet simple, set of categories: music, books, TV, movies, activites and interests.  Why not structure a news feed around these categories, plus a Twitter-esque “what are you up to?” (or Facebook’s “What’s on your mind”)?

For each category, imagine you replaced “Favorite” with “Latest” and posted updates by category.  What are you listening to these days? What’s your favorite TV show this season? What book did you just finish?

Now imagine a feed divied up by these categories.  You could see all the updates at once, of course.  But when looking for new music I could click the Music tab on my Feed to see all my friends’ updates on “Latest Music.”

I suspect that this adaptation of the profile structure would have provoked less rage than the original News Feed rollout.  And though that opportunity is missed, it may not be too late to introduce some sort of basic tag/category structure that accomplishes the same thing.

I know it’d make me check Facebook more often.

*I hesitate to second guess these decisions as I generally think users’ reactions against changes to Facebook – the News Feed being the most prominent example – represent a disappointing bias against change of any kind.  Most users didn’t think much about the changes, nor did they give themselves time to grow accustomed to them; they simply protested something new.