Facebook improvements

Some time ago, I became aware of Instituut voor Veteranen-NIOOO's "Live and Remember" project (http://www.liveandremember.be/ ), which publishes the personal information of veterans on facebook. Although this is a good project to put ex-combatants back into the spotlights, the project clearly exposes a major defect in Facebook. Facebook is in fact originally designed as a comprehensive "white pages", or a database of (living) individuals to list their contact information However, given the long list of people who are deceased, and the fact that the list of deceased people (which were still alive at the time of their addition) is increasingly longer, the creation of separate categories (for living persons and deceased persons) seems inevitable.

At the moment the people in Facebook have not been categorized as such. A categorization, and a slightly different lay-out of the contact information in this category (eg "Location" becomes "Past location", the searching of the name of a deceased person, and their location is split-up into the two categories (to avoid having living people/locations (and vice versa) found in the search), ... "Nickname" should also be added (eg to facilitate the searching on well-known deceased persons). An example of this is eg Avicenna, Dioscorides, Pliny ... A directive might be prepared for the "Personal Data", eg in the example of Avicenna, Dioscorides, ... no extensive information should be listed; inventions and personal achievements can be listed in online encyclopedias such as wikipedia ( a link to the page on wikipedia can be placed above).

Facebook could also discard the divisioning in the various countries (eg using seperate websites as http://nl-nl.facebook.com/, http://fr-fr.facebook.com/, ...), so that the aspiration to attain a global “white pages” could be better fulfilled (ie people are not bound to a particular country). Also, in the future, facebook could probably be linked with the personal information the national authorities possess (and with electronic identity cards, ...). This information could then be used to take out non-existent persons, and false personal information from the database. It would also keep the personal information more up-to-date.

Finally, there is also the problem that companies are more and more being integrated into Facebook. As Facebook is primarily focused on being a “white pages” and not a “yellow pages”, this information is best also taken out. Instead, perhaps a new database can be made (eg called “Yellow pages Online” or “Companybook”) to place the companies in. This would keep the database simpler and more efficient (especially as people from more and more countries being are added.