Dear Facebook, Here's What's Up.

Facebook Suggestions: Insult to Injury
Reconnect with your friend's sibling who shot you down. Friend a stranger who responded to your Craigslist ad. Be friends with a domain squatter you once emailed. Facebook your friend's dog. Reconnect with a PBR can. Be a fan of Parma, Ohio. A friend's Facebook status once stated that Facebook recommended that he reconnect with a friend who died, and it ruined his day. Does Facebook know how antagonizing this feature is? While recommendations for fan pages and groups like "See if this pickle can get more fans than nickleback" and "Anne Frank would be so pissed if she knew people read her diary" do make me laugh at my computer screen for a couple seconds, nearly all of their suggestions are completely unwelcome. The upper right corner of the Facebook Homepage is prime real estate. It should not annoy us, or at least have a better recommendation algorithm compared to the crap bombarded upon us. There is a REASON we are not friends with someone who shares 58 of our facebook friends. We obviously know that person, and deemed them facebook friendship unworthy.

Here's a suggestion:
Use this corner space for good. Give me music recs. Maybe movie recs. Facebook could be Pandora. Show me what friends are listening to. There is an iLike app on Facebook. iLike is MySpace's baby. Why doesn't Facebook have their own gig? They are effing EF BEE. It would be cool if you could build playlists with your Facebook friends. There are user friendly ways to profit here, so it boggles me why they rather use this space to harass people into writing on a random wall. The kid in your high school Spanish class and group partner in your Accounting project junior year do not actually care about your life, as we are misled to believe.

There is all this smoke about how Facebook may start charging users monthly fees to stalk one another. There are countless avenues they can pursue to profit without upsetting the proletariat.

Market Your Marketplace
Rhetorical Question:
Why does Facebook categorize the Marketplace as an "application" versus just having it as a key component of their website? Ask a person on the street to tell you what "app" means. Facebook apps have a bad rep. I fathom that over 90% of Americans believe it's something that steals your personal information and sells it to advertisers. You are the #2 website in the world. Your marketplace should be marketable, not (cr)app. The options to monetize are endless.

Easy as Pi:

For me to access the Marketplace, I typed 'marketplace' into Search. It took me to the Marketplace Fan page. I then clicked the button "Go to application" and was directed to a poorly designed amalgam of classified ads. Later, looking at my Application Settings under the "Account" tab, I now see that Marketplace appears on my Application list with the option to 'remove' it... essentially equating it with a third party app like What Disney Princess are You? (Pocahontas). In a world where we want to clear out any unused programs and spyware, why does Facebook depict their Marketplace as if it were an extra program taking up space on your hard drive? Does having Marketplace as an application, mean you have granted them permission to spam you with ads based on your interests? People don't know. Perhaps it's in the Terms and Conditions that everyone reads.

Sidenote:
When I have ever clicked on applications out of curiosity (usually without realizing they were applications), but pressed the back button when a pop-up window appeared asking me to "Allow Access," the app still appeared on my list of Applications even though I never clicked "Allow Access." Even if it's harmless, this pisses people off. People like to think they have control, so don't let them feel like they've been tricked over something silly, because they may retaliate by never clicking on anything that even looks like it could be a third party app out of paranoia. Be straightforward about apps, eliminate the mystery and avoid deception.

Photo Privacy Settings: Tag and Hide-and-Go-Seek
Facebook has an all or nothing approach, like that O-Town song. I had my privacy settings set so friends of friends could see all albums. I'm a team player, and I had it this way so my friends' friends could see the good photos they were tagged in. Then, I realized I had friends who were pretty important and knew other important (..and not so important) people who I did not want peering through my photos, seeing my "true colors."

A Win-Win Solution:
Provide a privacy option so that friends of a friend who is tagged in a photo can see the specific photo(s) your friend is tagged in without having access to the rest of the album (..there may be some incriminating photos). Your friend's friends can click on your name and see no photos except your default picture, though still see this one great photo of your friend under his or her tagged photos. Everyone's happy.

Red Flags, Blue Balls
This one is huge. You hope a hottie posted a link to a cool band on your wall. What actually happened was your coworker's aunt commented on her Facebook status update, that you indiscriminately thumbed up last week to show moral support. Is this event really red-flag worthy?

I long for the days of Old School (The)Facebook. You saw birthdays, pokes, and if you were lucky... a large envelope appeared on your screen letting you know someone had sent you a message. It was quite magical. And was from a person just to you. Now we get little red flags alerting us a friend canceled her birthday that you only 'Maybe' wanted to attend and when 8 invitees reply-alled to this message. I vote that we color coordinate alerts. Mass group emails could be yellow, personal messages could be color coordinated based on gender. The hotter the pink the hotter the girl. The technology is probably out there.

Best regards,
Liz Carlson