Facebook is an amazing social network. Some say it is the best social network available. I agree with that statement; however, there is still work to be done. I took it upon myself to compile a list of things Facebook could add that would improve the service not only for myself, but for many others in the future.

In the depths of my brain I was able to come up with the following ideas to improve Facebook:

Application Tagging Support:

By my last count, there were well over 5,000 applications available for the Facebook platform (there were around 4,000 a month ago). That is an impressive amount of applications to try and sort through when searching for anything specific. I'm not going to question why, but instead insist that the Facebook development team gives application developers (or even users) the ability to add tags to describe applications.

For a crude example, if I want an application that is related to tennis, then I should be able to focus in on only those applications that have tags related to tennis and sports. Tags would make things much easier for locating application, and it would assist in the discovery of new applications. This would make both the developers and users happier. Facebook could even add those wonderful little tag-clouds to see what is popular at the current time.

Greater Privacy Control:

One of the greatest features of Facebook is the ability to specify privacy options for your profile. You can go from allowing everyone see everything, to only yourself having access to your information. It was, and still is one of the features that sets Facebook in a league of its own.

I do see limitation with the current setup. For instance, there are some groups of people who I don't mind seeing everything on my profile; there are some groups that I would like to keep from seeing only my contact information, but have access to everything else; and finally, there is a group who I would like to keep from seeing anything but the bare essentials on my profile, like work and business related information. That is three layers of privacy I would like to be able to work with. There are currently only two layers of privacy right now.

Those people who only have a few friends on Facebook might be able to deal with it (like myself for example), but those who have a greater amount of friends might need another layer of privacy. Facebook has advertised in the past about how they allow great privacy control, so I would like to see this added in the future. As an alternative to this, Facebook could possibly give us unlimited privacy layers and just let us create privacy groups instead, and assign friends to each group.

News Feed Options:

I am talking about the information you see when you first login to Facebook. There are a few issues I have with it. I dislike the "popular events in (whichever area/college) network" idea that they came up with. Yet some people might like it. So how about giving us the ability to specify if we want to see this or not?

I also do not appreciate that they display advertisements in the news feed. I would not mind if they changed the background where there is an advertisement to more clearly show that it is an ad, but to throw an it in the content with only the small text of Sponsored seems wrong to me. I know they have to pay the bills, but there are other ways to do this without being overly obtrusive.

Better Photo Quality:

I love taking photographs, and having a place to share them is important. Facebook is a great place to do the sharing part. Sure there are alternative services like Flickr and Photobucket, but why deal with that when you have all your friends on Facebook? So Facebook, let us show higher quality photos.

Right now, I believe the limit is 800 x 600 for photo size; this is sufficient, but I'd like to see higher resolution photographs. I wouldn't mind having an extra advertisement displayed above or below these photographs to cover the cost for hosting larger images. I think it would be a worthy addition. I'm sure most people who snap photos would agree as well.

Profile Statistics:

This should be familiar to the MySpace crowd. You have a counter that shows you how many people have visited your site, and you have the option to reset that counter at any time. I didn't find it particularly useful to me when using MySpace, but with Facebook, I believe it could be a useful tool.

If Facebook developers wanted to go for bonus points, they could add in a simple graph to show you your daily, monthly, and yearly viewing statistics; yes, I am a statistics freak. If they happened to match the quality of Socialistics, I would be very impressed. These are features that I would appreciate.

Last Words:

Most of these suggestions would be easy to implement. It does not take a rocket scientist to come up with these ideas. Privacy controls would certainly be the winner for me; however, any of the other improvements that I listed are great ways to further improve Facebook for the future.

Check out Tech In Demand's Top 8 Facebook Applications.