Facebook’s popularity is fading fast, at least that’s what the media would have us believe. We tend to agree, basically because we don’t see a whole lot of activity there these days. Except for fan pages, it seems that anyone who wanted to join up has already done so. Fan pages abound, and yes we have one, but we don’t see a huge increase in the numbers of personal profiles. What will Facebook look like in ten years? We don’t have any idea but if it’s going to even exist at that time, here’s some changes they could make.

1. Allow private messages on posts – Renren.com, the Chinese version of Facebook, lets users make private comments on anything that anyone else posts. When you say something on Facebook, the world sees it. You’d think that China, because of its supposed personal restrictions wouldn’t offer something like this but they do.

2. Get rid of some of the ads – Facebook has sold out, in our opinion, forcing ads on their users. Not only do we see them on the sidebar, which we’re used to, we now see them in the middle of our newsfeed. Hell, we even see suggested ads, as if we’d shout, “Yeah Facebook! That’s a cool Buick ad right in the middle of my Timeline!”

3. Stop asking for personal information – We know where we live, where we went to school, where we work or used to work…why is that important to Facebook? The tendency now is to simply lie about all of this. Why not? It’s not as if we’re going to get something out of revealing our private information, right? Facebook gets something out of it, not its users.

4. Let us like something but don’t tell the world about it – This one change would mean the world to almost every Facebook user. Liking a photo or a comment isn’t always something we want to share, is it? As long as the original poster knows we like something, why does every single person who can see that post have to know? Can you imagine how this affects teens? High school is tough enough without the added pressure of everyone knowing that someone liked someone’s photo.

5. Stop with the repetition of posts – There is no reason to repeat the same post endlessly in the newsfeed, is there? We get a notice if there is activity on something that we’ve interacted with so why does Facebook persist in showing us the same post ten times or more as we scroll down the newsfeed? Sure, we can hide the story but why do we have to interact with something we don’t want to see anyway. (We actually know why this is. Facebook is logging our ‘hides’ in order to tune the different types of ads that they put on our main page.)

Last but not least, and it’s not one of the five main points that we’d like to see changed, but Facebook does need a thumbs down icon, don’t you think? Not ‘liking’ something is not the same as ‘not liking’ it. We’ve all seen comments and opinions that we really disagree with so let us, darn it!

OK, that’s our list, what’s yours? Maybe we missed some key things here. Let us know. Better yet, let us know on your very own Facebook page. Here’s the link: Computers Made Simple on Facebook 

As always, thanks for reading!