The people demanded freedom...

So in case you don't have facebook, there has been a serious uproar on this college hotspot (by the way, this is the 7th most trafficked site on the internet, did you know?) this week.

They introduced a new feature - the feed. Basically it just tells you every change that any one of your facebook friends makes. When I opened facebook I found out that Michael Hadady (The Miz) had become friends with some person I'd never heard of. That Dan Waller added the Steve Miller Band to his list of favorite music. That Lisa Ahlness was in a relationship with some dude - hey there's his picture even! I was pretty creeped out...and so was the rest of the facebook community.

Many groups began to pop up with names such as "I hate the new facebook" "Facebook has gone too far" "Students for Facebook Privacy." My favorite facebook-change-related-group was started by my friend Mark. It was called "The Irony That I Can See You Joined an Anti-Stalking Group is Delicious" with the info reading: "Yeah, we all know that you don't like the new Stalker Facebook thanks to the new Stalker Facebook. Hilarious, Facebook, truly hilarious." To further prove his point, I saw on my feed immediately that he'd started this group - I joined it two minutes after it was created. No invitation necessary, that's how well this feed works!


This may seem ridiculous to you non-facebookers, in fact it may not even make sense, but if you even signed on this past week you would realize that this was a genuine (catastrophic even?) uproar. People were boycotting the website! Within 48 hours, 650,000 people had joined the facebook group "Students against Facebook News Feed (Official Petition to Facebook)."

I'm willing to bet thousands of blogs, such as my friend Matt's, were confined to the subject of facebook all week.

Ahh, facebook.

My own opinion? I don't think it's the end of the world, but they've definitely gone too far. It's a great site - superior to Myspace in almost every single way and, when used appropriately (many people waste waaay too much time on it), it's a pretty good way to keep in touch with old friends, remember birthdays, and share photos (unlimited quantity!!). The site achieved internet-perfection when it added photo albums - they should have stopped there.

When they started feeding in blogs a few weeks ago I remember thinking "uhh, this might be a bit much..." and then this feed happened. Mostly the feed just offers us information quickly that we could find out ourselves if we looked hard enough, but still it felt a little...creepy. On the other hand, I've gotten more than my fair share of hearty laughs over the whole debacle and, yes, I loved it when a few of my friends started spamming the feed.

Anyway, I wondered what would happen. Could the creators ignore this? Would its members' clear opinions about this new feature make a difference?

I guess so! I opened facebook today and saw this:

An Open Letter from Mark Zuckerberg:
We really messed this one up. When we launched News Feed and Mini-Feed we were trying to provide you with a stream of information about your social world. Instead, we did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them. I'd like to try to correct those errors now.

When I made Facebook two years ago my goal was to help people understand what was going on in their world a little better. I wanted to create an environment where people could share whatever information they wanted, but also have control over whom they shared that information with. I think a lot of the success we've seen is because of these basic principles.

We made the site so that all of our members are a part of smaller networks like schools, companies or regions, so you can only see the profiles of people who are in your networks and your friends. We did this to make sure you could share information with the people you care about. This is the same reason we have built extensive privacy settings – to give you even more control over who you share your information with.

Somehow we missed this point with Feed and we didn't build in the proper privacy controls right away. This was a big mistake on our part, and I'm sorry for it. But apologizing isn't enough. I wanted to make sure we did something about it, and quickly. So we have been coding nonstop for two days to get you better privacy controls. This new privacy page will allow you to choose which types of stories go into your Mini-Feed and your friends' News Feeds, and it also lists the type of actions Facebook will never let any other person know about. If you have more comments, please send them over.

This may sound silly, but I want to thank all of you who have written in and created groups and protested. Even though I wish I hadn't made so many of you angry, I am glad we got to hear you. And I am also glad that News Feed highlighted all these groups so people could find them and share their opinions with each other as well.

About a week ago I created a group called Free Flow of Information on the Internet, because that's what I believe in – helping people share information with the people they want to share it with. I'd encourage you to check it out to learn more about what guides those of us who make Facebook. Tomorrow at 4pm est, I will be in that group with a bunch of people from Facebook, and we would love to discuss all of this with you. It would be great to see you there.

Thanks for taking the time to read this,

Mark

This is fantastic - I'm loving all the controversy!



I haven't checked out the new settings yet, but I'm guessing they're substantial. More than anything, I'm interested in what you guys think, so...

Facebook members: Do you think these new settings are enough? Do you think all the uproar was a total overreaction? Do you think it's funny? Are you upset/did you feel invaded by the changes? Do you even care? Lee Ferron, as a new member of facebook (as of this week), what do you think of all this hubbub?





*Thanks to Matt Barnes who created the picture I stole for this entry.