Facebook Plus: A good idea?

Here's my idea...

I ‘like’ Facebook very much and I think that FB’s pledge to keep it a free service is wise. However there are some shortcomings to the FB service (in my opinion) and I have decided that I personally would be willing to pay a nominal fee for expanded service. Here’s what I want...

The ability to mark and save conversation threads in folders just like one can with traditional e-mail. It’s obvious that FB’s popularity has led many of us to have our (sometimes longwinded) conversations and debates on FB rather than through e-mail. The problem is that while it is quite easy to search for past conversations in e-mail and then save them in folders if one wants to, this is all but undoable with FB presently. Scrolling back through one’s timeline even for just a few hours or a day is tedious and likely to disappoint.

When I see people frantically typing out their heart and mind as part of a discussion which they are passionate about I get a sad feeling knowing that that conversation which someone is painstakingly transcribing is just as transitory as a verbal conversation. Many years ago, having tired of covering the same ground, over and over in debates about various issues, personal and political, I decided that such debates are largely useless unless they are carried out in a written format which can be referred to and quoted from so as to avoid the tedium of repetition, especially when alcohol is involved.

It was this thought that led me to create the truism “You haven’t said a thing until you’ve written it down.” I say this not only because the written record allows a debate to continue in a most efficient manner, but also because it is much easier to judge the validity of an idea or statement when it is in text, to be scrutinized. Of course, all of us find it a bit tiring to write everything down that we say, so in this important sense, the popularity of Facebook is doing the user a disservice. That is because Facebook takes conversations whose participants have already taken the time and energy to put in print for posterity and then FB delivers them to us briefly only for them to disappear into the clouds a bit later. Even the personal message feature of Facebook is very primitive compared to basic e-mail.

So, I say this, for the added benefit to be able to search my FB conversations and save them in folders like e-mail I would gladly pay a fee for...’Facebook Plus’.