Lately there have been some blogpostings about the amount of friends people have on Facebook. AllFacebook posted an entry about how many is too much and cited an article in New York Times according to which people with over 800 friends “are perceived as insecure”. Mashable wrote about Mark Cuban that had just crossed the magical (?) limit of 5000 friends on Facebook. I appreciate the fact that some people are collecting friends on Facebook like others collect stamps or old coins or what ever. But I can’t understand how they can cope with the News Feed on Facebook. I have left Facebook (almost completely) mostly because of the fact that my 50 friends generate such amount of News Feed that I get overloaded with information. I don’t care if someone has been bitten by a vampyre or if someone else added another useless application. And I can’t turn the News Feeds off!

Facebook has to do two things before I return to Facebook and I know they would just love to have me back . First of all, users have to have the choice to turn the news feed off or at least choose what kind of news will be posted. I was hoping that the possibility to set “likes” and “dislikes” on the news would have been a selflearning feature that would have eventueally learnt which news I want to see and which I don’t want to see, but no, at least not yet. The second thing Facebook needs to do is to redesign categorizing of friends. Current categorizing by how people know each other is not working very well. The idea is good because I might have things on my profile that I want my friends to see but that I don’t want my colleagues to see, and vice versa. But currently this feature is not working.