5 Things Facebook Needs to Improve Right Now

We love Facebook, ok? It’s a wild love affair. However, just like in every relationship, frustration abounds, because many of Facebook’s features either don’t work as intended, are too slow, or simply lack the details to be truly great. Here’s our list of possible Facebook improvements that would make our hearts smile.
Facebook Chat

Ok, we talked about this a month and a half ago, and nothing has been done. Facebook Chat is a fantastic way to chat with folks with whom you might not be chatting on a regular basis - old friends from high school, business acquaintances and so forth. However, it’s plagued with problems: your chat buddies seem to keep going offline (although they’re not), messages aren’t delivered, chat is down for maintenance.

In fact, I know several users who’ve confessed that they only say hello on Facebook Chat and then move on to Google Talk because it’s so much more reliable. Furthermore, it lacks some crucial features: the chat log only goes back a short time period, and it’s impossible to access when your chat buddy is offline (very frustrating). Fix it, please.
Facebook Mail

We get it: it’s not meant to be a full featured e-mail client, it’s meant to be simple. However, some of its “feats” truly baffle us. For example, you can’t archive messages, you can only delete them. But even when you delete them, you can still view them, if someone replies to a deleted thread. It’s not a deal breaker, we’d just like to see a little consistency here.

The view, which always shows you a thumbnail next to each message, cannot be changed. When you start actually using the Mail feature, you start aching for a way to see more items on the page, and get rid of the thumbnails. Also, no drafts? Don’t know about the rest of the world, but I like to create drafts for later use. In short - and we know we might be asking for a lot here, but what the hell - we’d like it to be more like Gmail.
Events

Facebook could be a fantastic way to find out about events. In my case, those events are mostly related to music. But I’m not using Facebook for this, I’m using Last.FM. Why, you ask? Well, because it’s vastly better. First of all, you can set an exact date to find events; you can also set it to see events in a proximity (100 miles, for example) of a certain location (I can’t seem to find the proximity feature in the new design, though. Have they removed it? If you have any clue, please let me know.). This means you can find all the concerts in the vicinity of New Jersey occurring in a three day window a month from now. Neat.

Now, let’s check the situation on Facebook. You can only browse events that’ll happen today, tomorrow, in one week, or one month. And no location. Gee, great: that makes the entire thing totally useless, because searching for movies that will happen in the next month anywhere in the world will yield thousands of results. Useless results. Add location and precise date to the mix, and the Events feature will be a zillion times better. No need to thank me, Facebook, a hefty check will do.
Live Feed

This feature was what made me start regularly using Facebook. I don’t like being given a choice of what Facebook thinks is most interesting to me, like I do in the News Feed; I like to see it all. But I can’t, because the damn thing is awfully laggy. Yes, I’m aware that syncing all that data across thousands of servers and delivering it to millions of users across the globe is tricky. That’s why you, Facebook, are smart and Microsoft gave you a lot of money. Find a way to make it work.
Filtering

This is a minor point, but it’s still something that could be improved upon. You can filter out things from the News Feed - very precisely, I might add - but you can’t filter out things from the status updates, photos, or posted items list. Why? And while we’re at it, having filters in email wouldn’t exactly hurt our feelings, either.