I’ve been using Facebook for the last 3 years and have seen it constantly evolve.  For this post, I will discuss 2 ways that I could see the popular social networking company improve its services: Slideshows and Videos. 

Slideshow:
The first way I could see Facebook improve is by taking a similar approach to photo browsing as Shutterfly.  I came up with this when my uncle sent me pictures on Shutterfly of a Diwali celebration that my family had back in Michigan.  I just sat back, relaxed, and did not have to do much work to go through all of the pictures.

As you may be able to see.  Using Shutterfly, you can adjust slideshow speed, picture size, and control fading as the pictures appear.  Whereas the Facebook approach is more manual-intensive:

On Facebook, to go to the next picture in a photo album, you have to either click on the picture or click on ‘Next.’  The maximum number of photos that any given album contained on Facebook is 60, which means that it takes 60 clicks to get through the album.  This is inefficient and strenuous.  If Facebook implements a slideshow option, I am sure that millions of users would be grateful.

Video:
From my point-of-view, the difference between MySpace and YouTube versus Facebook is that MySpace and YouTube encourages users to express their creativity through means of video creation and profile customization whereas Facebook regulates user capabilities for profiles which may not necessarily be a bad thing for Facebook.  However, if this barrier is broken in an organized fashion, I strongly believe that Facebook could take away a large amount of market-share away from MySpace if somehow they integrate video features.

MySpace claims that a lot of YouTube’s growth is accounted by the fact that many YouTube videos are embedded in MySpace user profiles.  If this is true, this could be problematic for YouTube if MySpace disallows the embedding of YouTube videos into MySpace user profiles.  Facebook could learn from this mistake and create a video upload system called Facebook Videos rather than allowing users to embed videos from YouTube.  This could potentially take marketshare away from YouTube as well.

One of the cool features that Facebook has right now is the ability to tag people in photo stills, but just imagine if you could tag friends in videos as well.  That would be a guaranteed hit.  Although the back-end programming of such a system would be very complex, I could see it as being possible.

Thus far, Facebook has been adapting to demanding web technologies such as ‘bookmarking’ and allowing users to import their blogs via RSS, but these types of features could help take Facebook to the next level.  I strongly believe in that.