Currently Facebook offers “most recent” and “top stories” options for the news feed.  These are fine for now, but we need to get on to the next level.  Ideally that would be “by category.”  That’s right, certain keywords and phrases would cause linking within the news feed during a given period of time and users could see not just a dinner pic, a meme, a inspirational note, a hurricane update, one after the other.  Instead they could see the most recent 4-6 of each together.  Now, by putting them together, there would not be a need for each one taking up half of your news feed space.  4-6 dinner pictures could be placed in your news feed as a block, with the friends name and the first 5 words from the description under each one, or perhaps expanding out with a “mouse over” like what happens now when you hold the mouse over a commenter’s thumbnail.  The fact is, then you are browsing images, you very quickly can see what interests you and what doesn’t.  Memes, religious images, and political images are all examples of things you may or may not be in the mood for.  If images could be automatically categorized, which we now have the technology to do quickly and easily, the overall experience of the news feed browse would be quite possibly, a manageable event.  Currently many just don’t have the time to go through all the posts that were put up since the last time they visited.  That is a recipe for disconnection and apathy.  Categories – that’s the remedy.

If I haven’t sold you yet on the obvious value to this concept for every Facebook user, then just consider the obvious follow on thought.  With this categorization, the user will be able to just select a particular category and go through that specific portion of the news feed.  Oh yeah.  Still not sold?  Just consider the opposite.  Consider being able to prohibit that particular portion of the news feed;  like all political posts, all religious or all atheist posts (or both), or pics containing particular words.

What crazy nonsense is this?  A news feed catered just the way I want, with only information I want to see?  Who would be interested in that?