July 2, 2008
I've gotten semi-addicted to Facebook lately, thanks to a critical mass of my friends being on it. There's one small place where it could stand improvement, though.
Currently, I can lock down some parts of my profile to be friends-only. That would be most of it; I've got my address on there for starters. This means that anyone I "friend" (that word is not supposed to be a verb) knows where I live.
Well, what about people I'm OK with, but don't necessarily want to see randomly show up at my apartment? There needs to be a second level of friend. Just call it what it is -- acquaintance. They show up in the friend list like everyone else; they just don't see things that are friends-only (as opposed to non-public, which both friends and acquaintances would see).
This would require some back-end work on Facebook's part -- the friend access flag (probably a yes/no bit) would need to change to a tinyint (8 bit) at least, possibly a 32-bit int if the conversion is more expensive than 3 bytes of database space, as would the flag in the friends list. Then there'd be testing of... oh... pretty much everything on the site. Including all the third-party widgets, though they could probably get by if all they're doing is seeing if Column1 = you and then getting a list of who's in Column2. (Assuming, of course, that the database has a table that just lists friend combos, which makes sense when I look at it quickly.)
But anyway, this would let me "friend" people I know, without putting some stuff out there I only want my (close) friends seeing. It'd just be a change that affects everything on the site. No problem, right?
