For the past few months Facebook has been obsessed with Twitter. It’s easy to see why. Twitter is addicitve. Many twitter users are constantly on twitter. Whenever you goto twitter there is always something new happening. Facebook obviously wants this experience on facebook. Why not copy twitter. I think Facebook could do it and do it better. Last week Facebook unveiled their new home page layout. Inspite of critical feedback. It is a vast improvement with lots of potential.

What’s Good

Facebook is alive again. There is a deep sense of community and freshness. Updates happen a lot less often that twitter, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing… and the new design is encouraging more frequent posts and updates.

What’s Missing

A lot of what’s missing is being addressed by Facebook. Here are two critical features they haven’t addressed yet:

1. Stackable filters

The new design is built to be stacked. I want to see links from my college group. In the current iteration of facebook, it’s one or the other.

2. Create groups from search results.

As soon as the new design was unveiled I set out to use it. I created a group of all my highschool friends. Though it’s an easy list to find, simply by using search, there is no way to take that search result and create a group from it. Instead the only approach is to individually select each of my 200+ friends from highschool. It was a time consuming exercise I won’t repeat.

If Facebook can figure out the grouping properly it will solve the current issue most users are disappointed by, as well as solving an obvious flaw with the Twitter / FriendFeed model.