New features display activities on Facebook to network of friends. Some call the feed too intrusive.
RYAN HAGEN
Staff Writer
Facebook’s new face had some students closing the book on the site—which for some was like pulling the plug on a good friend.
The site’s decision to announce profile changes to all of a users’ friends through a News Feed and Mini Feed proved massively unpopular.
“It’s a privacy issue for me,” said junior Cameron Lee, who stopped using Facebook out of frustration.
Creator Mark Zuckerberg said he realized the decision had proved disastrous within hours and coded nonstop for two days to remedy it.
“We really messed this one up,” he said in an open letter Friday, Sept. 8, three days after launching the changes. Users may now stop Mini Feed from announcing most types of activities.
Hours after Mini Feed began announcing every change made to a profile, students formed protest groups demanding, at least, the option of removing themselves from the feeds. The largest, “Students Against Facebook News Feed (Official Petition to Facebook),” approached 745,000 members, nearly 250 of them from Pepperdine.
“It’s creepy and stalker-ish,” said Aubrey Luhdorff, a Pepperdine freshman who joined two groups opposing the new features. Most students echoed that opinion.
While all information displayed on the Mini-Feed could previously be seen on individual profiles, that’s no consolation to most. “[Before] it wasn’t right in your face,” Luhdorff said. “If I broke up [with my boyfriend], I wouldn’t want it there for everyone to see.”
Also, some objected that the additional information cluttered the page, with most students having 100 or more friends who update their profiles frequently. “A lot of those people are just acquaintances…I don’t really care if they have a new friend,” Lee said.
Zuckerberg envisioned great popularity for the addition, citing its convenience. He compared it to news highlights, as opposed to the “encyclopedia entries” that are people’s profiles. And some users agree.
“Nothing has changed, it’s just organized better,” according to the group “Actually, I like the Facebook News Feed,” with 650 members and growing. A bulletin there also points to “Facebook Stalker,” a free download that has done essentially the same thing since being released Aug. 17.
No Pepperdine students appeared to have joined a group approving the change.
Freshman Tom Lambert continues to advocate completely removing News Feed. “I don’t like my group of friends being like CNN,” he said. “It was getting too much like MySpace.”
Facebook boasts 9 million members belonging to networks such as college or high school, a fraction of MySpace’s 110 million members. But it is far more popular at most colleges, including Pepperdine, partly because of its greater privacy settings.
“Somehow we missed that point with News Feed and Mini Feed,” wrote Zuckerberg in his letter. He went on to say that they’d been “coding nonstop for two days to get you better privacy controls,” like controlling what types of information would be included in the Mini Feed.
Zuckerberg also thanked the protesters, noting that News Feed allowed protest groups to grow because every time someone joined a group against News Feed, their friends saw that information.
This “may be Gen Y’s first official revolution,” said Time magazine, although Pepperdine students agreed that was an exaggeration. Time called today’s college students the “Facebook generation,” and said their rebellion against Facebook itself was especially notable.
With more than 10 percent of Facebook users protesting, it was a significant movement and points to Facebook’s power as a protesting tool.
The protests appear over for now, with calls for a boycott being withdrawn and most expressing satisfaction with Facebook’s response to the problem.
“It’s not exactly my favorite feature,” said Lambert, but he left the anti-feed group.
09-14-2006