Okay. I’ll admit the title is a bit much, but Facebook is doing something wrong. Instead of stimulating the network of information, it’s becoming a pit where information goes in and never comes out. I can tweet, blog, embed a video, or post a link and images to Facebook, but once it is on Facebook I can’t send the information out in the other direction. I can’t even Pinterest my Facebook images! This lack of interaction with other websites is not conducive to the free flow of information.
What needs to change is the single directional flow of data.
Is Facebook really “connected” with Twitter? Or is this a funnel of doom?
I can Tweet anything and it will be posted on Facebook, but how come I can’t tweet Facebook content? The future of social media needs to be more cohesive. Most people share a lot on Facebook that could be shared elsewhere as well.
When this blog post is shared on Facebook people will refrain from liking or commenting on the actual blog and will do so on the Facebook post. The feedback becomes diverged and diluted. It would be so great to unify the “likes” or comments in both platforms or inhibit the “likes” on Facebook since there is already a “like” function on the blog post. My blog posts go to Facebook to be shared and garner views, but instead they fall prey to the reflexive action of liking the post on Facebook and stopping the conversations that could have existed on the blog posts.
A SELFISH PLEA:
Hey Facebook, sometimes I want to write a long post as a status in the heat of the moment but I copy and paste that content into a New Post on WordPress. Heck, if I could type a short blog post on Facebook and then share it to my blog, or tweet it, or embed it elsewhere that would be kickass. Please, oh please, create a more interrelated platform that marries all of these services together. I just want there to be a union between my input information and my modes of output into the internet.
After all, it is your mission:
IN TECH NEWS:
-Facebook IS actually revamping their News Feed. I don’t know if it will be as poorly received as YouTube’s layout change, but hopefully it will create a more cohesive and practical experience. I could scroll forever on the current News Feed! If I wanted to do that I would go on Tumblr. (Check out the article here: http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/07/facebook-launches-multiple-topic-based-feeds-bigger-images-and-a-consistent-design-across-devices/) I hope people don’t complain about a novel News Feed layout, the way that they avoided the cover profile layout.
-Facebook and hashtags? This could be good news actually. As long as those who are posting content aren’t using the most popular tags to garner views instead of the best tags that represent their content. (Seems like it’s merely a thought experiment right now: http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/14/hashtags-on-facebook-would-open-up-exploration-and-discovery-way-more-than-graph-search/)
Illustrated by Meli 
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