Facebook could start by realising that I'm not interested in Farmville updates from people I have never interacted with beyond accepting their initial friend request, and am very interested in updates from the people whose events I attend and messages I reply to. They have a wealth of data on how I intentionally interact with other Facebook users.
But most of the manual features for managing friends are already in place - you can update particular lists of people through groups, events and private messages. It's really not that tricky to decide who you want to invite to that awesome house party or on the cheap trip to Vegas.
Other features, such as the "how do you know them?" and focus on work/school/city networks seem to have actually been removed due to lack of use despite offering very intuitive and automatic categorisation of friends. Facebook's trajectory towards openness probably reflects a lack of desire towards using it in a structured way. A hypothetical startup whose main strength is removing the spam in the newsfeed and adding in the features they chose to remove probably isn't going to keep Zuck awake at night. I preferred Facebook before Zynga and gratuitous "liking", but I'm not going to persuade my closest friends to move to a clone to get rid of the bloat.
FWIW I think Dave's example of friend bloat is probably more a reflection of his social circle than underlying changes in Facebook itself. He'd have had a lot more friends in 2006 if he'd been attending university, and considerably fewer now if he was working 9-5 for an unglamorous small business and nobody read his blog. The number of friends I had grew far faster in early 2006 than in any subsequent period, and people I shared fleeting conversation whilst waiting for lectures with were arguably far more tangentially connected to me than, say, my sister.
"Facebook could start by realising that I'm not interested in Farmville updates "
OTOH, should Facebook be "smart" about this, or should they just provide a button to hide all Farmville updates? In fact, they try to do the first, and also do the second, so I don't know why people still complain about this.
I think they should do both, in a better and more obvious way. Certainly, some level of filtering of the feed has alwaye existed, but 1997 Yahoo tried at search and 2004 Hotmail had rudimentary spam filters and reporting tools. Google admittedly didn't have to fight against strong network effects to grab market share there, but it was the ability to incrementally improve that made their product offering more compelling rather than anything staggeringly original. And Yahoo and Microsoft had a better starting position to make improvements had they realised the true value of the underlying data on their user behaviour...
To be fair to Facebook's team, the feed does seem to have improved recently and not just because I've manually blocked Zynga apps. But with their data and talent there really shouldn't be any suggestion that a competitor starting from the ground up could better facilitate the social interaction they started off specialising in.
But most of the manual features for managing friends are already in place - you can update particular lists of people through groups, events and private messages. It's really not that tricky to decide who you want to invite to that awesome house party or on the cheap trip to Vegas.
Other features, such as the "how do you know them?" and focus on work/school/city networks seem to have actually been removed due to lack of use despite offering very intuitive and automatic categorisation of friends. Facebook's trajectory towards openness probably reflects a lack of desire towards using it in a structured way. A hypothetical startup whose main strength is removing the spam in the newsfeed and adding in the features they chose to remove probably isn't going to keep Zuck awake at night. I preferred Facebook before Zynga and gratuitous "liking", but I'm not going to persuade my closest friends to move to a clone to get rid of the bloat.
FWIW I think Dave's example of friend bloat is probably more a reflection of his social circle than underlying changes in Facebook itself. He'd have had a lot more friends in 2006 if he'd been attending university, and considerably fewer now if he was working 9-5 for an unglamorous small business and nobody read his blog. The number of friends I had grew far faster in early 2006 than in any subsequent period, and people I shared fleeting conversation whilst waiting for lectures with were arguably far more tangentially connected to me than, say, my sister.