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When Facebook released their new design weeks ago there was a massive uproar from users yet Facebook held firm in their decision to move forward. The shift appears to have been hastily as many users were instantly complaining about bugs found throughout the site as the new design was rolled out to everybody. One at a time, Facebook has been rolling out fixes to each of the minor issues users have been complaining about but there are still a few remaining. We’ve decided to post a list of the Top 10 most requested fixes from users that we’ve been hearing over the past week.
1. Display All Stories From Your Friends
Hands down, this has been the most requested update by users that have visited the Allfacebook.com public profile. When Facebook released the new feed a number of stories have been left out. First, relationship status changes do not create feed stories. Instead, they get displayed via the highlights area. Second, one of the most frequently generated stories before was “X of your friends have changed their profile picture”.
While I was tired of seeing that story, some users have said they would like to see it come back. The main point is that there are tons of stories that were visible via the previous “live feed” that are no longer visible and many users want those stories to return. I guess it just goes to show how much some of the users really want to know about their friends!
2. Fan Page/Public Profile Event Messages Don’t Go To Inbox
I’m throwing this one in there not because it was ever promised, but because it would improve the overall experience with public profiles. Currently when you create an event as a page/public profile admin, you can’t send any notifications to users about that event. While you can create a status update that links to the event, there is no way to message all users to alert them to it.
The one problem with Facebook creating this feature is the potential for abuse. That’s one of the primary reasons I would assume Facebook refrained from adding this functionality. Regardless of the abuse issues, there must be some way to work around this so that users can be more effectively notified of new events created by brands they’ve become a fan of.
3. The Ability To Comment On Wall Posts
While wall posts were once a fundamental component of communication on Facebook, comments have become increasingly prevalent making wall posts a somewhat “archaic” conversational method. When you post on somebody’s wall they must reply via your wall making the conversation a bit more challenging to follow from outsiders. While there is a single page where you can view the threaded conversation, it requires navigating to another page in contrast to comments which are all displayed inline.
4. Comments Don’t Create Feed Stories
If a user comments on a feed story, I personally believe that should create another story. The one problem with this feature would be drawing the line on where you stop. If someone is having a conversation, do you really want to view the entire dialog? My guess is that many users would say yes but this could quickly create an overload of information (as if there aren’t already enough stories).
5. Ability For Page Admins to Comment As Self
Facebook’s redesign is clearly aimed at making the site more conducive to conversations. From a “social media perspective”, conversation should always take place among individuals, not between brands and an individual. For example, consider Frank Eliason who created the Comcast Cares Twitter account to engage customers directly. He converses with others as Frank, not as Comcast.
The most successful way for engaging your customers is on a human level, which means person to person not brand to person.
6. Streaming Feed Display
When Facebook announced the redesign they described the new feed as a “real-time feed” that many users interpreted as a streaming feed similar to the live feed of the past design. Unfortunately it wasn’t streaming and many users were wondering what happened? In a recent blog post, Facebook told users that “One of the most common requests is the ability to see your stream update automatically. We will be adding the ability to turn on auto updating in the near future so you no longer need to refresh the page.”
So far that feature hasn’t appeared but we can only assume that it will begin showing up in the near future.
7. No API Integration To Page Statuses Yet
There’s a new design and the ability to invite users to your public profiles which is a great step in the right direction but developers and page admins are eagerly anticipating Facebook’s updated API. What will the new API include? The most anticipated item is the ability to view and update statuses automatically. Developers are also hoping for more access to information about the users that have become fans of any given page.
8. Mobile Interface for Managing Public Profiles
Currently there are plenty of ways to update your Facebook profile but there are much fewer ways to manage your public profile on mobile devices. One thing that Facebook has added is the ability to update your public profile statuses via text message but if you register your phone to a public profile, it removes the association with your personal profile. This makes it much more complicated to manage both a personal and public profile from one device.
Eventually I would assume that Facebook will let you switch between various profiles from a single device but for now this is just a wish.
9. Ability to View “Liked” Stories
Since Facebook added the ability to “like” various stories in your feed, users have been taking advantage of it to avoid having to take the time to write a comment. Many users have also been using it as a way to keep track of the stories they’d like to go back and read. Unfortunately, there is no archive page that enables users to view stories they liked.
10. Can’t Tag Pages In Photos
This is also one other feature request which wasn’t exactly promised but I still think it would be extremely useful. If page admins were able to tag their own uploaded photos with their brand, it would improve the overall experience. Additionally, fans should be able to tag brand in their own photos. While it has the potential for spam, it also provides an amazing branded opportunity and why shouldn’t Facebook come up with a way to monetize one of their most expensive products: photos.
As a brand owner, I would be willing to pay a monthly fee to let my fans tag the brand in their photos. I’m sure countless other brands would be willing to do the exact same thing.
Conclusion
There have been plenty of benefits to come from the new Facebook design but there are also still plenty of features that are lacking. We’ve taken the time to highlight ten of those missing features but I’m sure there are many others. Are there any features that you would like to see added?
Yeah. 2 things…
1. I want to see all of the comments I’ve written in one place (similar to your idea of showing the things you’ve liked). Some users (myself included), like to recall their past conversations, and finding them is the same problem.
2. Instead of just “Like”, we need a “hate” too. Obviously, don’t call it that, but you should be able to vote up and down stories, instead of just up.
There are a couple bugs with fan pages that really irk me. The first one, which took me longer than it should have to resolve, is that if I was already a fan of a page, it was automatically disabled from my feed (even the Public Profiles feed stream). Any pages I added after the redesign showed up fine. I had to physically go in and add my favorite fan pages to show in my stream.
The other thing (that’s brought up in #5), which, as someone who runs 3 pages really gets to me, is the fact that I can’t post as “me” on my pages, I always post as the band. There’s currently a bug where, if I click to comment on something on the page, it shows my personal photo, so it looks like it will post as me (Lisa), but then as soon as I click to submit it, it switches back to the band. I really wish there was an option to submit as myself, and also to upload photos to the fan album (as the admin, I’m forced to create official albums, so I can’t post fan photos people have sent me to the fan album).
Lastly, you’re 100% right. There should be a display all stories button for sure, even those people I have blocked. Also, we should see whose profile photos have been changed via the Photos feed.
“2. Instead of just “Like”, we need a “hate” too. Obviously, don’t call it that, but you should be able to vote up and down stories, instead of just up.”
It seems odd that they’d put a like without a dislike in the first place. Not that I enjoy being negative, but it makes sense to have both.
I have said this befor and I’ll say it now. The number one problem remaining in my mind is the lack of friends stories.
Once you head to m.facebook.com and see how much your missing it’s very annoying that they haven’t fixed this yet.
The mobile site has TONS mmore info.
For me, the biggest annoyance is that updates like “X is now friends with Y” and “X is now a fan of Z” no longer show up in the feed. Those were legitimately useful tools for building a social network, and in my mind, what made Facebook such a valuable tool. Now they’ve taken some of those tools away, as though they assumed that everybody has already built their networks and that people only care about hearing from the friends and organizations they already know.
I’m amazed at how many people said they use Facebook more after the redesign, since I find it to be significantly less useful now.
#1 is the big one, and it’s HUGE. It’s like they poked our eye out!
Also, I HATE that the birthdays are down on the bottom right corner now. Days went by where I was thinking no one had a birthday, and now I have to page all the way down there to look everyday. Suck.
Best list I’ve seen by far, Nick. Great work. And great comments, too, everyone. I’ll add one more suggestion to the heap:
The ability to add applications to a page without using your personal credentials. For example, I use my company’s page and wanted to integrate our company Twitter updates into the page’s status. No can do. All it did was port in my personal tweets that I had installed on my personal account.
I also miss the “birthdays” at the top of the homepage. They are much less visible now (instead ads are there) and it is easy to miss them.
I completely agree with Matthew that the friendship and page-group joining stories are the most important ones missing from the News Feed (point 1 in the post).
Bring them all back!
For me, it’s the friends updates, as people above have said. I have to think that Facebook has seen a clear dropoff in the number of new friends made by existing users. As the person a few replies up said, going to m.facebook.com and seeing the content that’s missing from the full version is just depressing.
Also, the new update to the Groups interface is absurd. Now there’s nowhere for you to see who the most recent members are. If you run a relatively small group (like a high school class group), losing this option is awful, because you have to page through a ridiculous pop-up and try to remember whether someone’s new or not. Or, if you belong to a small group where you might just check in every so often, not being able to see the most recent new members also stinks. Yeech.
And, what about the inability to reply easily to someone’s Wall message, without clicking on Wall-to-Wall? (resulting in tons of status-updates-that-are-actually-replies-to-Wall-postings) I agree that, really, Wall posts have become somewhat obsolete. They should be more like “Post a Note on Someone’s Profile” — someone can post, then you and them and others can comment back and forth to your hearts’ content, and have it all show up on just one wall. No different than if you posted a note on your own profile.
And, the easiest one of all–show me my most recent status update at the top of the home page. It’s ridiculous that that one hasn’t been fixed.
I also want a connection with Twitter on a public profile that doesn’t update my personal status message. (I tried to use the main Twitter connector to do this, and even though it said it can be used on public profiles, it took over my personal status message, which I don’t want.)
I miss the live feed, too.
I fear they’re trying to run out the clock, hoping that people will finally give up complaining about all the lost functionality. I probably use Facebook about 20% of the amount that I used to. It’s really bums me out to use it now, because they just killed the fun of it.
Well a lot of good ideas. Personally I really dont need to many features - more back to basics.
What it comes down to is the lack of user-defined control. I miss the ability to not see certain applications used by my friends without hiding their entire feed.
Also: my blog I import as notes to Facebook doesn’t show images within the post. This is a big loss for me since I am an illustrator who post my artwork to keep my friends and prospects abreast of what I’m creating. Is there a fix to this with redesigned Facebook?
I would definitely like the ability to drag and drop each or at least most of the objects on the home page and adjust their position within the page - e.g. to move new friends suggestion down, while display all events on the top of right column. Each user has different preferences and I dont see it as big proglem to allow, when you can drag and drop stream filters in left column
I’m still waiting for the ability to answer my 4100 “friends” requests, they said this limit would be removed, but to me, the “public profile” is still very limited compared to the user profile
I would be very careful about putting up a “Hate” next to “Like”. This could be abused in cyber bullying and harassment. Although with Facebook, you can see just who clicked on “like”, so I would think that this would work the same way with “hate” so it would be easier to identify any cyberbullying and harassment trends.
If you’re scoffing at this, believe me, this could and can happen elsewhere on the web. At least Facebook makes it easy to identify those people.
The ability to retweet is also missing
The broken back button! Can’t stand not being able to hit Back without being sent back Home or back to the domain at was at an hour ago before I even loaded facebook! This is a design flaw, not a feature, and should have held up the whole redesign…
I cannot stand how our own status updates look identical to wall posts on our profile pages. That is a HORRIBLE design flaw that I’ve heard many complain about, and I can’t believe they haven’t fixed it yet.
use selective twitter to update your page status
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/apps/application.php?id=115463795461&b&ref=pd_r
on a sidenote, the facebook connect here should allow the commenter post the comment back to facebook as feed story, just use facebook connect for member to comment is such a waste
I too agree the functionality of this release is severely compromised. For me the gotcha’s are:
1. Forces users to create friends groups to de-clutter your main feed. Used to just be able to see less of some people. Now it’s binary. People are either off or on. I ended up hiding 1/2 my friends. I’ll probably never see their updates.
2. Your #1: Missing friends stories. Notably when they are tagged in photos. Why isn’t that at LEAST under photo stories? Currently Photo stories only shows pics friends post, not pics they were tagged in.
3. Ability to turn off 3rd party apps in your news feed. Argh. The quizzes. Having to hide or block them 1 by 1 is hugely myspace like. (teenage petty clutter)
(oh, and I agree the m.mobile.com site is far more useful. I actually use it on my PC a lot. It doesn’t redirect you to the main site thankfully)
The ability to edit the text of the comments I often attach to my posted items, or “Links”, after I’ve submitted them would be nice.
I agree with your list AND would add that I miss the ability to click see “more of” or “less of” people and types of stories. I’d rather see someone sometimes than hide them completely, and I’d rather see some people more often.
Does anyone else want to go back to having a choice with the size of their POST instead of just Remove or Post?
ie: One Line, More lines, Large PIC, Small PIC/thumbnail?
Also same if I become a FAN of something.
ie: sometimes I want a small sentence post or I don’t want a notice at all (so remove is fine) but sometimes I want to POST IT BIG & add thumbnail so my interested FB friends who visit my wall might notice.
YES Robin, I would like to have the choice of making the size of my posts One line, More lines, Large pic, Small pic/thumbnail. I also think the font is too big and takes up to much space. I liked being able to collapse certain posts so I could see others - this includes collapsing comments. we used to have control over that too. With all these feeds, one has to be able to control the space. Especially if FB is considering #1. I can’t stand clutter and need to have some kind of filing system like collapsable feeds and a perhaps the choice of font style and/or size?
Major bug is the fact that you can “ban” people who are obsessive “fans” that are constantly making harassing comments on page items, but it only bans them from posting on the wall and they can still leave hundreds of harassing messages everyday with no way to put an end to it. There needs to be a way to block fans from messing it up for everyone else.
This is what everyone wants from facebook -
We are all different people to different groups of people. We behave differently with our friends, family members and collegues. So, it is important that all these groups are properly demarcarted within facebook.
We already have enough privacy settings - but does it really serve the purpose? What is the use of ‘restricting’ a particular group from writing on your wall?
One solution is to have three different facebook logins with completely different friends list so that you can maintain three different lives on facebook. I know this sucks…
So, the simple way is to have a small feature on facebook: You decide (automatically) which posts are to be seen by which group. (eg). ANY post (wall post, photos etc…) by any of my family members should be seen ONLY by my other family members. (Of course, I will decide who are my family members).
Similarly, any wall post from any of my friends, should be seen only by my other friends…
The new privacy setting required here would be (group to group) or something similar.
And finally, whenever I post to MY wall, I should be able to choose which groups should be able to see that.
Now, dont you all agree that this is what YOU would like too?
ABSOLUTELY! Would love to have a general list of my friends I find just for me (only I see and know) but then different FB groups or SUB-accounts like you mention above. examples: I would love my family on FB with me but not necessarily on my general main wall with everyone and meanwhile I am happy to find certain old friends and classmates but not necessarily to have them a part of my every day FB life! Same thing with busness aquaintances but not really appropraiet fro them to all be a part of my “main/daily FB life”. And the problem with creating separate groups is they still all have to be friends on my MAIN FB Page! I want them only in that group!
so any updates about the above suggestion? i would also like to keep those settings, selective groups with selective wall posts….
yesterday i hit the hide button by mistake it ommitted farmville completely and nobody knows how to restore it i was up all night trying it is ruining my farmville game due to collecting on ribbons and so on upset and hope there is a easy way out quick