Facebook Subscriptions
A little while back, I wrote a post suggesting that micro-messaging systems such as Twitter needed to add typing to their message streams to help users manage the flood of information they receive.
Today, Facebook announced their new Subscriptions feature, which allows users to control how much information they receive from each source that they subscribe to - all messages, most messages, or only the most important messages. Interestingly, it also includes typing - Facebook identifies 4 types, namely 'Life Events', 'Status Updates', 'Photos and Videos', and 'Games'.
Just 4 types doesn't seem like very many, but the fine-grained, open-ended typing system that I originally proposed may be too complex for most people's needs. Facebook may have done well to pick just 4 types that make sense in the context of the (closed) Facebook platform. Most people don't want to spend all day fine-tuning their message feed: they just want to block those annoying Farmville updates and the endless kitten pictures. Facebook has probably made a good trade-off between flexibility and ease of use.
I don't think we've seen the end of this particular evolution, though. Facebook status updates and Twitter tweets (among others) represent an ecosystem of information that may be as rich and important as the web itself. Unlike the web, which was at least partially designed (although it has since hugely outgrown Tim Berners-Lee's original conception), micro-messaging has emerged in a largely ad hoc and unguided fashion. There's still plenty of work to be done on structuring this information space to make it manageable and searchable.
More on that later.
