Facebook’s Killer Feature
Posted by Nick O'Neill on August 24th, 2007 4:42 PMAt lunch today I had a revelation. If Facebook expanded their privacy settings just a little bit, they could end LinkedIn’s success. Imagine if you were able to control all of your identities from one location. There would be three generic profile settings (or privacy categories): friends, professional and family. For each of those you can control which items users in that category could see.
Additionally, you could select what individuals could see, in the case that the general privacy settings did not fit them accurately. Once that occurred, Facebook would be capable of completely replacing all functionality that LinkedIn provides. What would take this one step further is the ability to control what applications each privacy category could access. I previously discussed this feature set and have thoroughly considered developing it within an application. Rather than investing the time and energy, I think Facebook should release this as an extended feature. Do you think this would be a useful feature?
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This is the ONE killer feature that will be a success for FB.. of course there will be some people out there that will have no idea.. or find it a little complicated :)
The way I see it: classes of 'friends'
Class 1 - Best friends - can see class 1/2/3/4/5
Class 2 - Friends (todays friends) - Can see class 2/3/4/5
Class 3 - Acquantances (yesterdays friends) - Can see class 3/4/5
Class 4 - Colleagues - Can see class 4/5
Class 5 - Randoms (poke buddys etc) and also your public profile - Can see class 5
It removes the stupid limited profile. (what does that mean really?) and your 'friends' don't need to know what class they are in anyway!
Like you said, would replace LinkedIn, and also means you can have a public profile that actually means something!
All you allfacebook readers out there.. send this in as an improvement to Facebook
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crazy idea.
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Perhaps some editing is needed.
Good point though, interesting to ponder.
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I've written several posts about how to work around the one-class friend system, and the limited profile helps to some degree. But they all introduce friction into a system that otherwise is simple and smooth. I think I have a successful way to do it, but eventually Facebook is going to come up with the simple friend class management.
I would settle for two classes: personal and professional.
I saw they now have a book exchange application, which is nice. But I agree that multiple classes of friends would be the LInkedIn killer. It probably will take a lot of work to do this, but it definitely should be the priority as Facebook aims at the more adult user base.
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