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I think what would make Facebook kick ass is if they could find a way to keep you updated on what happens in groups where there is conversation you actually wan

• unalone 18y ago
  Absolutely! I think the problem that they're running into is that it's tricky to make something like that without cluttering. The best solution I've seen is what the Vanilla forum system does (http://getvanilla.com http://getvanilla.com). They provide a bunch of options to give you slices into information. What are the last 5 threads you visited? Which are new? Which were the last 5 you replied to? The idea of thinly slicing information is excellent and works very well if you're a focused web site. (It inspired a lot of my startup's front page design.) The problem is that Facebook is all about the aggregation. They can't dedicate that many resources to one application. For them, it's all about that little notification window, and that means that you can probably only really give users one little notification for any particular update. So, unless their users click into the Groups application, there's nothing they can do. It would be interesting to see if, now that Facebook's increasing their level of aggregation, they begin increasing the amounts of information an application can pipe to users. That might let Groups gain prominence again, at the risk of increasing the level of spam existent on the site.