That's how I feel as well. Actually I never really thought Facebook's interface was that good - mediocre at best. But one thing I thought was cool was the way it handled recommendations. But because Facebook had this design flaw built in of allowing anyone becoming your friend, and then sharing everything with everyone, the recommendation engine has become a bit useless, since now it's more of a way to discover other people, rather than connect you to your real friends, the way it used to be in the beginning.

This is a design flaw of all previous social networks, including Facebook and I believe it's what led most of them to become irrelevant for the users, because it really weakened and diluted the types of relationships you can have on Facebook.

I also don't think this is something you can just patch up later on. They tried it with Lists and Groups, and it didn't work. Google+ has this built-in from the beginning and it's why I think it will succeed. I've actually noticed this is a huge problem about a year ago and I've been thinking ever since how this could be fixed. Google's solution is similar but even better than what I thought was the solution. It surprises me how well they got this.

>the recommendation engine has become a bit useless, since now it's more of a way to discover other people, rather than connect you to your real friends

My FB friends are all people I've known at one time in real life. Not necessarily friends but certainly people I've been friendly with. The recommendation engine does quite a good job of flagging new people that I know (amid lots I don't) and letting me choose to reconnect with them or not.

>Actually I never really thought Facebook's interface was that good - mediocre at best.

Why do you think it's only mediocre? What's keeping it from being good?

They don't let you do simple things ... you can't search your posts, you can't search your inbox (used to be able to, but it never worked right, and now they've taken it away) ... hitting enter submits your comment so to make a paragraph you have to hold down shift when you hit enter (wtf?) ... sometimes links open in new tabs, sometimes they don't so if you're scrolling through your news feed and get to, say, 2 days ago, then you click a link which doesn't open in a new page ... you lose your place and have to scroll through 2 days worth of posts again ...

Little inanities like that.

>to make a paragraph you have to hold down shift when you hit enter

I didn't know you could do that. Thanks!

Well, first of all groups are flat categories for messages, not tags.

You cannot have, say, a smaller group included in a larger group like for example: your former classroom colleagues group included in the larger group of all high-school colleagues from your school, included in yet another larger group of all people you know from your city from the same generation (useful in a small city were you know most such people).

Then, there's the interface.

I just looked at it and I can't find an interface to re-organize my current list of friends in Lists. I also can't find a way to filter the messages only from people in a certain list. Lists also have the same problem as groups, they are categories for people, meaning that one person can only belong in one List. And when posting a message on your wall, is there even an option for posting only to a certain list, as I can't see it.

And then, their biggest problem (I think) is the legacy.

People have been building huge lists of friends without thinking about organizing that list. People now post updates and engage in conversations like on Twitter - as if their message will reach their hole list and even people outside of it as well.

Embarrassing comments are a minority, as people in general are aware that their coworkers or family will see their drunken pictures (except many teenagers that don't give a shit, but someday they will). So it's a lot of self-censorship, not to mention the vanity contest.

On the other hand if you knew that your message will reach only your friendly-neighborhood buddies, I don't think you'll show much restraint, since sounding smart or cool is useless and even condescending to people who actually know who you are; getting much nicer and exciting conversations.

I haven't tried Google+ yet, but I'm excited that Facebook may finally have some competition, much needed IMHO.

Some good points, some odd ones (why would you really need a hierarchy of groups inside of other groups?), but the interface part is mostly wrong/exists already.

I just looked at it and I can't find an interface to re-organize my current list of friends in Lists.

Account->Edit Friends, each friend has "Edit Lists" next to them on hover

I also can't find a way to filter the messages only from people in a certain list

Click the arrow beside Most Recent on the News Feed, then you can filter by any list

Lists also have the same problem as groups, they are categories for people, meaning that one person can only belong in one List

One person can belong in as many lists as you want them to

And when posting a message on your wall, is there even an option for posting only to a certain list, as I can't see it.

Click the lock beside the share button -> Custom edit -> Specific People -> Type whatever lists you want

I've actually been wondering what the hell facebook has been doing with all of these engineers. Most of the changes I've seen on facebook have been pretty minor, no significant feature launches in the past couple years. I guess they do only have 1/10th as many employees as Google does, but it still doesn't make any sense to have a couple thousand engineers and no visible progress; I feel like they must have a lot going on internally that is unannounced. If we don't see any big moves by facebook in the next year (especially if Circles manages to have a successful public launch in the immediate future) I would be really surprised.

facebook has hit that incredibly difficult point where they can't do anything cool anymore. the outrage that happens every time they introduce even the slightest change is huge; if they try to do anything cool they risk alienating a huge portion of their users. at with their current growth rate, they don't need to change anything.

Maybe they're doing it wrong, then? Google adds features that fundamentally alter my web-experience all the time, but nobody minds because they either

-package it as a completely separate product with its own url (gmail.com, maps.google.com, etc.) before gradually integrating it into search results and other products. -make them optional (i.e. Google Instant, Gmail Labs) -do a test run on a small subset of users (which Facebook does only to test before they scale, seemingly never to determine if the change will piss off users)

In short, maybe continually tweaking core features like Messages, the Timeline, Photos, etc. isn't the only way or even the most effective way they can leverage their almighty graph.

There's been a couple stories lately about them having negative growth rate of users. It's not really clear if that translates into a negative growth rate in pageviews or whether their pageview-per-user is still increasing..

are you sure that's a negative growth rate, or a declining growth rate? i'm pretty sure their net growth rate is still positive, even if it's slowing down.

It's not really clear. Their new user sign-ups are certainly declining, but "new user signups" cannot possibly be negative.

Based on this article: http://news.oneindia.in/2011/06/13/tech-facebook-growth-rate...

If I am reading it right they are saying there is negative growth rate is the US and Canada, but still positive growth rate in emerging markets resulting in an overall positive but declining growth rate.