Although it feels like it’s been around forever, Facebook turned 9 years old Monday.
The brainchild of Mark Zuckerberg and his fellow co-founders, Facebook has grown from a Harvard dorm-room project into a social network of more than 1.06 billion members.
Although Facebook is still the king of social networks, it’s far from perfect. So here are nine features that could improve users’ experience.
1. GIFs. Tumblr has them. Google+ has them. And we want them. GIFs are making a huge comeback, but Facebook has yet to acknowledge that. If you upload a GIF to Facebook, all you’ll see is a still picture instead of looping images that produce a silent video. Let us post moving GIFs, Facebook!
2. Editable statuses. There’s one awesome feature Google+ has that Facebook doesn’t have: the ability to edit statuses. Facebook lets users edit comments and edit photo captions, but for some reason, the Menlo Park, Calif.-based company hasn’t introduced the ability to edit statuses yet. The company hinted that it was testing the feature last summer, but it hasn’t announced anything yet.
3. Statuses with emoticons. Nowadays, it’s not enough to say you’re happy _ you also have to show it with an emoticon. Many people use emoticons in texts and emails, and soon they may be able to on their statuses as well. Last week, Facebook revealed that it has begun to test that feature on a small number of users, so don’t be surprised if you see more statuses with smiley faces in the future.
4. Threaded comments. Sometimes when you post a status, the dialogue breaks up into more than one conversation. For that reason, Facebook introduced a threaded comments feature for Facebook Pages last year that makes it easier to follow specific conversations the same way as on Reddit. That feature is nice, but it’d be nicer if it was expanded to regular users and not just Pages.
5. Graph Search for everyone. Last month, Facebook introduced Graph Search _ a tool that easily lets you scour for information about your friends through your Facebook network. The company has released this feature for some users, but it still has a long way to go before it rolls it out to all users. In fact, Graph Search only works for users in English at this point. Hey, Facebook, let the rest of us try Graph Search!
6. Dislike button. If there’s one feature many people want but likely will never get, this is it. Although websites such as YouTube, Reddit and others allow their users to vote thumbs-down or down-vote an item, Facebook only lets users “like” things. But not everything is sunshine and rainbows, Facebook. Let us dislike too.
7. Favorite posts. A neat feature that Facebook could borrow from Twitter is the ability to favorite a post. “Favoriting” on Twitter allows users to essentially bookmark their favorite tweets and easily pull them up whenever they want to. Right now, there is no equivalent on Facebook, which makes it difficult to find something a friend posted a few months or years back.
8. “Want” button. There’s a difference between liking something and wanting something, and a number of Facebook users want to make that distinction. Pressing a “Want” button could let users create wish lists of products they want and allow others to see those items. We know Facebook is testing the feature, but the company has yet to expand it to all users.
9. Facebook Wi-Fi. In November, we learned that Facebook was testing a product that would allow users at participating retailers to access the store’s Wi-Fi network simply by checking in with their Facebook profiles. “Facebook Wi-Fi” seems like a solid idea that would make it quicker for users to access stores’ Wi-Fi networks, but we haven’t heard anything else about Facebook Wi-Fi since we first found out the company was testing it.
- Associated Press