Suggestions for Facebook

When I signed up for Facebook a few years ago I thought it was just a passing thing. I sign up for pretty much anything that's new just to keep up with the new technology and ideas. In the last year or so it seems that a lot of people I know have signed up and friended me and it has actually become a semi-useful tool for finding old friends.

I don't use it to keep in touch with people, I find people and then I keep in touch with them myself. The reason for this is privacy. The privacy settings are weak at best.

My main issue is that out of my 200 and some friends, maybe 20 of them are what I call "real friends," people that I actually know and talk to and email and really care about. Another 30 or so are what I call "semi-friends," these are people that I don't actively keep up with but care about keeping in touch with. The rest are "acquaintances," people I either knew in elementary school, or know in passing, but don't really keep up with, or care about keeping up with, other than those 30 seconds after they friend me where I say "how about that! I haven't heard from this person in 20 years!"

This causes several problems... First of all when Facebook suggests people I may know there is a big difference between someone who is friends with 10 of my "real" friends or even my "semi-friends" and someone who is friends with 40 of my "acquaintances." Facebook doesn't differentiate between these and as a result the suggestions of people I may know has become useless.

The other problem is that the privacy settings let me set privacy levels for the following groups of people:

1. Everyone
2. Friends
3. Friends of Friends
4. My Networks
5. Combinations of these

It does not differentiate between my custom lists of people (coworkers, high school friends, college friends, real friends) nor does it differentiate between my self-defined groups of "real friends" versus "acquaintances." I may want a real friend to be able to see my phone number but I don't want an acquaintance to even know where I work. The only way I can accomplish this is to be the most restrictive (not give out my information to anyone).

I know that Zuckerberg wants Facebook to mirror real social relationships, the "social graph" as he so often refers to it. My primary benefit from Facebook is reconnecting with people I haven't spoken to or seen or heard from in years. Some of these people I was good friends with and want to stay in touch with. Others are people I bumped into in the hallways of high school, and don't really care about keeping in touch with, but still want to have an idea what is going on with them. I don't want to limit my friends to only the people I would consider "real" friends because that would eliminate the majority of my benefit from using Facebook.

I never update my status. First off I don't care who is eating a taco for lunch and I don't want other people to know what I am eating for lunch. Secondly if there is anything I really do want my friends to know chances are I don't want my acquaintances to know it, or prefer to not share it with them.

So I would suggest that Facebook does the following:

• Differentiate between real friends and acquaintances. This would be for purposes of categorizing friends, showing updates in the news feed, and suggesting people you may know. This would also be useful for privacy settings.
• Allow privacy settings to be configured for user defined lists of friends. This would give me a level of control to let people know what I want them to know and would give me some more freedom to share information that I right now do not feel comfortable sharing.