I've seen a real boom in the amount of friends I've added on Facebook in the past week or two. I hate to use a buzzword but it really seems like you reach a “tipping point” where you have a big enough circle of friends that someone finding you leads to a better chance of finding other people you know (or them finding you.)
The funny thing is I'm still not sure what Facebook is for. I mean, adding the newsfeed, even though controversial at the time, makes it really easy to follow what your friends are up to. But beyond that IM-level of superficiality (“Jason joined the group, “I'm from a small town – wanna fight about it?” or “Jason is up when he should be sleeping” or “Jason removed Fried Green Tomatoes from his list of favourite movies” or “Jason posted on Friend X's wall: 'What's up?'”), what's the point? I think I'm maybe missing something (and the fact that I finally expanded my profile to include more than a single favourite book/movie/TV show plus the fact that I'm checking Facebook obsessively to see these new tidbits of various friends appear means there is *something* to it.)
Anyhow, part of me thought about submitting the following list to Digg. But seeing how many sites get shut down after being linked to on that site (er, assuming more than 11 people Digg your story! 
), it's a gamble I'm not willing to take at least until I get my bandwidth increased again. I doubled it after the shutdowns at the end of October/November but I'm still pushing my limit every month as more people find this site.
It's kind of like a virus – once you put a site out there and show that you're going to keep it up, more and more people will inevitably find you and some are going to stick around. For instance, joining the Sask Blogs aggregator has led to a whole new influx of non-library-related readers. (That site also links to similar blog aggregators for most other provinces further down on the left side if you're interested in checking out some blogs beyond the usual ones you might read.)
So as usual, that's a lot of preamble before the main event. Here you go…
Five Easy Ways to Improve Facebook
5. Instead of just “Friends”, have two categories for connections – “friends” plus “acquaintances” for people you might add because of a common geographical, educational or other interest. Actually, why not allow users to categorize friends as much as they want? I'd love to be able to have groups set-up for library school friends, people I worked with, people from my hometown, working librarians I know, family members and so on.
4. Turn Facebook into a full-fledged online address book by allowing users to enter contact details for friends and acquaintances, even if they aren't existing members. The easiest way to do this? Buy Plaxo.
3. Have spots for not just “hometown” but current place of residence and former place(s) of residence. Sort of related, allow people to choose whether or not to display the history of changes to their profile, similar to how you can see how a Wikipedia page has changed over time.
2. Make the groups more active & useful somehow – perhaps by adding more about their activity levels in the newsfeeds? On that note, have an RSS feed of the Facebook newsfeed so you don't even have to log in to “playfully” stalk people. 
(Please, somebody post a better way to describe the type of stalking you do online with no harmful intent but near-total access to a person's life and actions. “Playful” isn't the word I'm looking for and I'm beginning to creep myself out every time I use it! 
)
1. My best idea is so obvious and yet has so much potential, I'm only going to share it if I (or my agent ) is contacted by somebody at Facebook. We'll talk…
(It's been a long time but I've got to give a Classmate of the Day to Quinn Dupont. I approached him with a pretty crazy idea last night and he's in. So I'm not going to say too much about it now but hopefully you'll hear more about in the weeks and months to come if the tech gods are willing.)
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