Facebook recognizes human fickleness: Adds option to hide event no-shows!

Changes afoot on Facebook (March 2010)! Stay tuned for update.

Wow, I didn’t know that Facebook was so responsive to user ideas!

Earlier this month I contacted the social-networking website with some suggestions for their event listing function. I’ve been using Facebook for more than a year to post information on Moth StorySlams and the Digital Cabaret in Los Angeles.

I’ve been noticing how people I invite to events tend to check out who’s coming and NOT coming to events (sort of like the way you do on Evite). It seems to me that if you’re wanting to promote an event, you want folks to see the number of people who ARE coming and NOT the number of folks who are not. So I wrote to Facebook on their Suggestions page and explained this.

And now today, when I went to add a new event: there it is!  See third line in the clipping below. I’m sure other folks made this suggestion too.

I’ll be curious to see how this helps with promoting an event. I know there are still a lot of Facebook users out there who never look at the event invitation panel on the right.

My other idea for Facebook was some sort of Digg-like function that weights events in the main newsfeed. If more people say that they’ll attend a group or share it with others, it appears more in the newsfeed, sort of like the notifications for joing a group or becoming a fan. The difference this would make would be that folks who haven’t responded would get a sense of how much excitement an event is generating.  Maybe this is too complicated to implement but we’ll see…

Thank you, Facebook! You continue to amaze us!