Just build a stupid forum. A local forum for every town.
I guess in terms of business I have no idea what they should do. Maybe they have local coupon plans or something but I wish I could see a local news site from them. They obviously play a huge part in distributing and making news these days but I would like to see a better way to have neighbors communicate and obviously Facebook could easily do this. They are always looking to open up anyway and get people out in the public.
I would try not to piss too many people off by adding some new features to Facebook or changing privacy settings. Instead they should just create some entirely new url unrelated to fb and slap their forum on there. They should start with every county and every incorporated town within that county. Just places people vote. Facebook is the best way to register a user for these sites as anonymous users in public conversations can often be horrible contributors, lying and full of generalizations.
One of the most important parts of a forum is the ability to lurk. One of the most important parts of local new sites or blogs are the comments. Being able to lurk through comments and threads for just your town would be quite handy I think. There obviously are difficulties with spam with traditional forums but I’m sure FB could handle that by ensuring users are real according to number of friends or something. Also, I would do no importing content from facebook posts with gps coordinates in town or from other articles concerning said town. Just let the content be organic.
The thing to do would be to launch it all hush hush, as a personal project of one of they engineers or teams. Anyway, I’ll work a bit on Townpress.org. Goodnight!
