Thursday, December 20, 2007

Facebook causes a recession

I went to a Facebook Developer Conference a couple months ago and they mentioned their top requested feature.  What was it?  Building new applications easily?  Launching ads & popups?  Buying stuff online?  Sharing my personal information with Google? 

Nope.  Categorization of friends. 

Now you can pile your friends into categories like "distant relatives" and "people who went to high school with people I know but I don't know them but I'll add them anyway" and "my dog's facebook friends".

The scary thing?  People can see when you're "Online Now" too.

The other scary thing?  Context.  Now whomever has access to these lists of friends also has access to any tags you assign to them. 

This is just a start. Expect to see lots of new Friend Lists features in 2008 that will give you more control over the information you share on Facebook and who you share it with.

Source: Facebook | The Facebook Blog

The problem?  Facebook, you just wiped about 2% more worth of productivity hours off the GDP of the US & Canada.  Any company that hasn't banned Facebook outright will inevitably have organization freaks sorting and filing their friends and relatives into various buckets. 

And the "Facebook whales"?  Robert Scoble, Donald Trump, Mark Cuban, Tila Tequila?  Something tells me they should hire somebody to manage their friends lists for them. 

Life's too short for Facebook Friends Lists.