New Facebook Redesign More Than Aesthetic
Michael Arrington
178 comments »
Facebook launched two new features and a major design change tonight that affects all of their 9.5 million users. The new products, called News Feed and Mini Feed, are designed to change what Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls Facebook’s old “Encyclopedic interface,” where pages mostly just list off information about people, to a stream of fresh news and attention content about the user, her friends and activities.
I went by the Facebook offices on Monday to see a demo of what’s just been launched. The two products show information about people and things as they occur. The first, News Feed, appears on the user’s “Home” (admin) page and shows new photos posted by friends, relationship status changes, people joinging groups, etc. It basically removes the need to go to every friend’s site every day to see what changes occured to their profile. In many ways this reminds me of my RSS stream of news that I view every day in NetNewsWire, for the blogs and other sites I care about.
The second product, Mini Feed, is a variation of News Feed but shows information only for a single user and appears directly on their profile page. It gives visitors to the page a quick view of what’s new for that user.
Like everything on Facebook, both of these products are subject to the standard Facebook privacy settings. This means only people you allow to view this data will be able to see it. What appears is based on who you are, who they are, and what rules are set.
These changes will confuse users for a while, but I agree with Ruchi Sanghvi on the Facebook blog who says “These features are not only different from anything we’ve had on Facebook before, but they’re quite unlike anything you can find on the web.” It’s interesting because Facebook clearly gets the idea of an attention metastream, where page views aren’t the currency that matters but rather how effectively the service allows users to communicate. Facebook users will now have a much easier way of staying up to date on what their friends are up to. It may mean less page views for Facebook in the short run as users rarely have to leave their home/admin page to see what’s going on with friends, but if it makes users love Facebook more (is that possible?), it’ll pay off in the end.
The screen shot below shows the News Feed rolling in on a Facebook user’s home/admin page.



I like this design. Social-RSS…
Although interesting and certainly useful, I’ve currently found that there’s actually no way to change your privacy settings such that you turn off this news feed (I’m not sure I want my friends to know the history of all the wall messages I’ve posted on, or the precise moment I’ve changed from in a relationship to single, etc.) - the only way to do so is to manually delete each news entry after you’ve done the act… a bit tedious at this point…
I’m mixed as to how much I like this change, although it’s good to see facebook still innovating.
There should be some customization options.
I think Facebook “gets it” more than any other popular SN site on the web.
Kudos to them on their new features.
I agree with Sam, there should be a way to turn it off. It just seems to flashy and annoying to be on the Home page. I’d rather just see my profile.
quite unlike anything you can find on the web?
why don’t you log into friendster and look under friend updates, this feature was launched last september.
then a few months later, linkedin jumped on the bandwagon - go to their homepage and look under the inbox.
hmmm, not a whole lot of innovation here, surprised it took facebook this long to catch up, not exactly moving at lightning speed are you, zuckerberg?
The new social feed feature is extremely invasive and there does not seem to be a way to turn it off. You can manually delete the feed entries from your profile page, but that is quite tedious.
Facebook is one huge privacy nightmare. Not only does it urge you to divulge as many details as possible about your private life, but it is making it increasingly easier for other users to track you. The friend approval system will prevent some of this, but people rarely reject requests. Additionally every person that went to your university is by default your friend, whether you know them or not…
This will make other college students (my friends) think way more carefully before doing normal facebook-esque things that they may not appreciate everyone knowing about… ie signing 10 walls in 2 minutes or flirting shamelessly with a girl other than one’s girlfriend (using wall posts etc).
Also, people don’t really care about changes to many of their “friends” facebook profiles because they aren’t really friends.
Downgrade.
Speak for yourself, Daniel. I use facebook to keep up with real friends and it’s nice that I can actually identify what changes have been made to a profile. I’m not saying that everyone is like me, but not everyone falls under your sweeping generalization.
Smells like Vox’s Neighborhood.
I agree… although these new features are definitely slick and nice to see… it’s really, really, going to turn a lot of people off from doing their daily business on facebook such as writing on walls, poking, and flirting with a million people… people simply don’t want others privy to that sort of info. There should have been custom settings in place before they rolled this out. I’m not too sure if facebook users are savvy enough to figure it out yet, but once they do…. it’s going to anger a lot of ‘em! And it’s going to hinder communication, not increase it. Overall, great additions.
Dave of Mind Petals
isn’t some of that like Y!360’s friend-update thing?
This brings creeping to a whole new level…
it’s really annoying at best — do I care if a friend of mine posted on some random persons wall? no.
How FB has gotten this far is unbelievable to me. The site is poorly designed at best, advertising does not convert (+ crappy ctrs), total lack of innovation, little global movement (even with Huge money from Accel), ++++++
I think they should have taken the $750 million and got out of town.
Either people are too paranoid of the “what-ifs” and the “I’m not sure” or I’m just apathetic about these. Until I start hearing terrible stories that occur due to this change, I don’t see anything wrong with it. As far as pageviews, I actually think it might increase it rather than decrease it; when you hear a friend is going to an event, you might want to click that event for more information now that you otherwise will never hear of.
These changes are pretty cool and would definitely increase facebook’s overall value among its users.
“Either people are too paranoid of the “what-ifs” and the “I’m not sure” or I’m just apathetic about these.”
It doesn’t matter if the concerns are valid, if users perceive problems, you have a problem.
And a lot of sites have been doing this sort of thing, so it’s hardly revolutionary. The guy who said these are quite unlike anything you can find on the web must be using only Facebook for the past year.
My god this is an awesome upgrade. What will they think of next?
The similarities between what we’re working on for what we call “People” in Flock and the News Feed that Facebook just launched are striking. It will be interesting to see what kind of feedback comes from their implementation.
interesting that if page views and time spent on the site is no longer the ‘currency’, what should be the new metrics? user satisfaction? how do we compare social networking sites?
Friend’ster had this feature for almost a year. So has Yahoo 360. This is not an innovation, and not particularly newsworthy.
The “news feed” concept is on Yahoo360 for quite a long time.
Definitely a nice update, though I think the news feed can almost be too overloaded with information. Settings would be nice to control what’s displayed.
I take exception to the assertion that “they’re quite unlike anything you can find on the web.”
The combination of granular access restrictions, friend activity aggregation and aggregation of activity on your account - together with blogs, files, photos, podcasting, social networking, customisation, wider RSS aggregation and tagging - has been available in Elgg for around two years. Elgg is open source, has no advertising, and is a platform that can be run on infrastructure owned by an institution or student organisation. Within a month it will also support OpenID for decentralised communication and participation.
Cool feature… BUT HOW CAN I TURN IT OFF!!!!!!!!!!
It’s all about Information Flow. Personally, I’m a fan of the feature. The real question is, will the other 7.5 million college students put up with it? Yes, the privacy settings for it, is one click away, but we all know how hard it is to get users to add even “more more click” to their lives. Should be interesting to watch.
-JLB
Dan Wilson and Andrew Smith are now lovers. 1:29am
Kevin McCormick added new photos. 1:10am
Random pics from the Gamma Phi lesbian orgy…
Dan Wilson joined the group UC Berkeley Rainbow Coalition. 1:09am
Ximena Hernandez removed her drunken profile picture. 9:22pm
Bobby Williams wrote a new note. 9:22pm
It’s a tough life.
I was at a party this Saturday over at Yale. I thought things between Mandy and I were good. We’ve been going out for a month. She said she had to run to the Hamptons to see her dying cousin. Wentworth, Bartholomew and I hit the Psi Upsilon frat party. We get there and low and behold, there’s Mandy getting wild with one of Yale’s football players…
Jeremey Hayes committed suicide. 7:45pm
Jeremey Hayes left the group Harvard Honor Roll Students. 7:28pm
Daniel Jones added “smoking blunts and playing video games” to his favorite activities. 7:08pm
Daniel Jones is now single. 6:48pm
Realist, yes! ;D
Friendster, Yahoo360, LinkedIN have had this for awhile. Realist — love your post!
Not sure I get how people are saying this isn’t revolutionary. Features like mini-feed may exist elsewhere but nothing like News Feed exists. It isn’t just a log of your friends actions it picks the stories you are most likely to want to see based on your behavior on the site.
I also don’t get how people think it is so creepy given that NOTHING is visible that wasn’t visible before. We aren’t exposing anything new, just doing a better job of exposing what was already visible. If people don’t want information to be so public, they should send messages instead of posting on walls and use privacy to limit visibility of photo albums and such.
Finally, if you don’t care about a story, then maybe you shouldn’t be friends with the person involved! Seriously, Facebook’s value is more than random flirtation, it is in connecting real people who care about each other online.
As a user I’m kind of turned off to it now. I know it wasn’t hard for someone else to go through my pages and see who else I had been talking to, but now everything i do on it is spoon fed to everyone who logs in.
As a friend just said to me “Why do you need to know that much?”. I know, because you can, but still..
Just my opinion.
Good article though.
Join the online group “Students against Facebook News Feed (Official Petition to Facebook)”.
Andrew there is a huge difference between “visible” and “promoted on all my friend’s homepages”.
As everyone has said, nothing new, been done all over the place. Facebook is just moving their homepage away from the static dashboard that it has been. Behind the trend, not ahead of it. Next…
“These features are not only different from anything we’ve had on Facebook before, but they’re quite unlike anything you can find on the web.”
That’s a joke…other sites, like LostCherry.com, have had an instant alert feature for at least half a year. LostCherry.com makes nice use of AJAX to make all interactivity instantaneous from a user’s homepage.
Back by popular demand. The saga continues:
Mark Zuckerberg wrote on the wall for the group $2 BILLION OR BUST. 6:25pm
Mark Zuckerberg has poked all the hot girls on Facebook. 6:14pm
Daniel Jones tagged Christie Harris in one photo. 6:01pm
“SLUT!!!” for “Pic of me and my new gf Jenna”
Willy Franks commented on Tara Henley’s photo “Can you really see my nipple in this pic?” 5:47pm
Denice James joined the group Professor Hank’s Female Only Tutoring Group. 5:20pm
Christie Harris wrote a new note. 5:11pm
I hate guys!!
I hate guys. They pretend like they love you but when push comes to shove, they just hurt you and only care about themselves. When I met Daniel in PSY 1703 (Human Sexuality) I thought he was the perfect guy. Nice, caring, generous. He was so into me the first time we made love in the dorms. Everything changed when I got pregnant…
Christie Harris is now single. 5:05pm
Christie Harris had an abortion. 4:21pm
Christie Harris and Daniel Jones were seen arguing in Annenberg Hall. 3:24pm
Irene O’Conner has joined the group Homework for Sale - Fast Turnaround. 3:05pm
Irene O’Conner has woken up. 2:55pm
Andrew B:
Based on your comments, it appears you work for Facebook? A suggestion: don’t argue with your users. Telling your users what they want is a huge business mistake. Effective companies let their users them tell them what they want. It’s very surprising that a company with a huge staff and lots of funding would apparently roll out a new feature that one could reasonably expect to be controversial without polling users, doing focus groups or at the very least giving users the option to turn it off.
Also telling them how to use your service (don’t do this, do this instead) is extremely dumb. Are you that out of touch with how your users utilize Facebook?
Facebook may have more value than random flirtation, but it’s naive to think that flirtation/hooking up isn’t one of the most popular uses of the service.
And while you’re here, I’d just like to extend a big thanks to the entire Facebook team. It has made getting laid in college so much easier. In fact, this past weekend I hooked up with some hot Sigma Kappa girls in Chico all thanks to your service! If you could add some feature that enables guys to rate how easy girls are, that would be killer!
This has to be the worst idea I’ve ever seen. Having your every move on facebook automatically show up on someone’s (your distantly related friends) “news feed” every time they log in is creepy/weird and just horrendous.
I seriously think facebook shot themselves in the foot with this one.
All of the Web 2.0 analysts that think this is “cool” or that they’re bringing social networking to a new level doesn’t understand the site, clearly isn’t a college student, and obviously can’t comprehend what its like to be a college student in a day and age where there is little privacy left to begin with.
Previously, if you cared about one of your hundreds of friends you’d visit their profile and interact.
Now information is automatically displayed about exactly how many wall posts they made, when they made them, and what they said all in consolidated sparknote-esque form. This wasn’t really available previously unless you really were a stalker and took the hours to view the profiles of all of a certain person’s friends, looked through their walls, and noted down the times they posted and what they said.
P.S. There are already tons of facebook groups with hundreds and hundreds of members dedicated to making it known that this feature sucks, and people are truly pissed off.
Just want to reiterate that the privacy setting on facebook apply to this data stream as well. The settings are up to the user.
The complaints Yahoo360 and LinkedIN, etc, got died down quickly, if they had any at all. They’ve had the feature for months, and everyone seems pretty content.
People like the feature it seems. I think there are even tools that let you do this on MySpace (3rd party scrapers that tell you when something is updated). Nice implementation of a ‘me-too’ feature.
I hear video might be big someday too. Maybe Facebook can get ahead of the curve and create a site where people upload videos and…
looking at these facebook snapshots i immediately (finally!) realized what those darned teenagers like so much about that darned myspace - it’s the essential creativity of the pages. look at the typical myspace page and it’s likely to look aesthetically horrible, but it will be *uniquely* ugly, at least. look at the profile page for a person on any other community website it’ll look uniquely utilitarian - square - conformist - adult - boring.
Somebody count the decrease in wall postings over the coming days?
Anyone else find it humorous that half of the comments here are saying that Facebook is late to the game with these features and the other half are saying that they suck? Can’t win either way.
Is that what they call a ‘FaceRiver’?
I think so.
Facebook is good for 2 things: Stalking people and remembering your friends’ birthdays. This feature only makes it much more fun/easier for the creepy stalkers. Now they won’t have to continously browse pages, but can easily find what’s been updated. This is the worst feature ever implemented to facebook, and I am sure even more stalkers will now arise.
Well, anyone saying that these features are late to the game don’t realize how entirely different they are from the supposed predecessors. Facebook has become the de facto standard for information about *people* in college (and, of course, working towards everyone). What makes this feature so compelling is that the first thing people do is go to facebook with things like relationship changes, events, etc. This makes ‘river’ actually have valuable and desirable (for close friends, at least) content.
I’d say the only issue here is that it exposes to users how much facebook actually knows and keeps track of. Of course there’s going to be an initial shockwave from people - already groups like “WTF facebook” have sprung up - but overtime I would imagine it works out. Anyones guess. Notes certainly haven’t picked up from what I can tell. What this additionally shows us, though, is the gap between what technologists think consumers want (or are ready for) and what consumers want (*). Maybe if every college student had an RSS reader, this would be an easier step for them to take in. I was addicted right away. Most of the negativity probably just falls into the “people hate change” category… so let’s just wait and see.
I do agree that there are a few privacy issues, and I think it was a bit shortsighted to not implement a disable feed feature to some degree. Other than that, I think it’s great.
As a college student, I can say everyone I have talked to about this seems to hate it. There is already a “Bring the Old Facebook back” group that is steadily gaining members. At least enable a feature to turn the feed off. I have no desire to see where one of my friends posted a comment. I get what you Andrew B is saying about FB being a place to connect with real people, but you have to keep in mind that many college kids just add people in order to have as many FB friends as possible. I know I have people I never talk to as friends and don’t feel like going through my friends list and deleting them. I like Facebook but do not want to dedicate that much time to it.
“…where pages mostly just list off information about people, to a stream of fresh news and attention content about the user, HER friends and activities.”
Who have you been stalking Michael?
steve_ray, I still didn’t see you point about how these features on facebook are entirely different from the supposed predecessors. It sounds like what you are saying is that the feature itself is the same but the content is different on facebook. More tangential wouldn’t you say?
I think it’s cool. The old home page was just wasted space anyway. And Facebooker’s always get upset when ANYTHING in the UI changes, so initial reaction is not really a good guage of whether it was in fact a good or bad change. I think it’ll grow on ‘em.
The concept of an update feed from your friends and interests is not new, nor unlike anything else on the web. Match.com implemented it on their homepage. Also, photo sharing site Ringo.com uses it as the main premise of the site.
Not to mention, what this feature ignores is that even people who don’t just “collect” Facebook friends generally have a gap between *friends* and *people they’re friendly with*. I have a group of guys from high school, for example; we hang out at parties, we’ll go out to a bar together, that sort of thing. But they certainly don’t need an up-to-the-minute newsfeed of the messages my girlfriend left for me on my wall. And my girlfriend certainly doesn’t need to know that some friend of mine, whom she dislikes, invited me to a party this weekend. Even though that information can all be removed from the newsfeed, that presumes that I’m sitting at my computer waiting to click that little ‘x’ immediately as things come in.
At the end of the day, though I dislike this feature, I don’t flat-out *hate* it. But what makes it so inappropriate is, as others have said, the lack of a way to disable it. And it’s borderline offensive to get an email from Facebook telling me, in no uncertain terms, that “newsfeeds cannot be disabled”, and then go on to claim that “Facebook takes pride in giving its users complete control over their information”. Thanks, but no thanks.
“I agree with Ruchi Sanghvi on the Facebook blog who says “These features are not only different from anything we’ve had on Facebook before, but they’re quite unlike anything you can find on the web.”
30boxes’ “Webtop” does this feature too as well as the ability to cull information from different sources like flickr, personal websites, etc.
Upcoming.org’s right sidebar also does this quite nicely when you are signed in.
I liked this when I misunderstood and thought they were releasing RSS feeds.
Hopefully this will happen for the personal mini-feeds (w/privacy controls.) The netwide feeds would be a bit disturbing to find distributed outside defined SN.
Although Facebooks API opening up implied ‘opening up’ I’m finding the details and subsequent strategies to be quite closed. IE, virtually everything facebook is locked into facebook unless their very stringent policies in the API persmissions are adheared to.
They’re trying to build the control tower and disguising it as a SN with an open attitude.
I don’t think anyone is claiming that FB invented the river
The idea is they have the RIGHT content to pull this off on a personal level. In some cases it doesn’t work or can have negative impact in your life (see jay’s comment), but for the most part it’s pretty engaging stuff. And I am in the “this will increase pageviews if it’s adopted” crowd. The River is all about getting you to click on new stuff that you wouldn’t have seen before.
Its funny that they think this addition will make people like it more. EVERYONE I KNOW likes it significantly less because of the changes. In fact, I would not be the least bit surprised if many people cut back on their useage of Facebook.
Why change something thats doesnt need changing? Bad move Zuckerberg
The backlash is on http://www.TalkFace.com. Not a popular move with facebook users!
School, work, death. I find it unfortunate that the site is chopped in to three categories. High school, College, and Work. What? Isn’t there one missing there? Social? Other?
Anyone ready to kick out 2 billion?
Feed won’t become RSS available anytime soon. The company obviously would like to use this to encourage more frequent user visits, and to redirect those extra visits to other areas of the site, to increase overall stickyness.
Also the feed as shown on the site is more rich than just a stream of content titles, including “types” and images.
I’m an early facebook engineer insider.
My book about Facebook and more on this topic are at http://www.fbbook.com.
account deactivated
Since I don’t have a Facebook account, I just wanted to let everyone know that I am now heading home for the day.
I will be sure to keep you all up to date as to what I eat for dinner, when I fart, and what TV show I just watched.
Thanks.
Some people are complaining about a “lack of privacy”, and what happens if friends can see too many of your changes. Remember, this lack of privacy was always there - perhaps only motivated friends saw this stuff before, but now every has a chance to glance at it to evaluate if it is interesting. And you don’t know that people more motivated to look at your profile and the people you’d like to be getting to know you better. Especially if you are a hot babe.
Also some complain about the trivia and excessive detail this shows. People will learn to make fewer trivial, lame changes, which will be good for everyone. And Facebook is certainly already well along with figuring out what items to sort to the top. The point here is to show that the data is there!
absolutely horrible, how the hell do we get rid of it??
Jay, I feel the same way:
“At the end of the day, though I dislike this feature, I don’t flat-out *hate* it. But what makes it so inappropriate is, as others have said, the lack of a way to disable it. And it’s borderline offensive to get an email from Facebook telling me, in no uncertain terms, that “newsfeeds cannot be disabled”, and then go on to claim that “Facebook takes pride in giving its users complete control over their information”. Thanks, but no thanks.”
What the hell is facebook thinking by not allowing us to disable this feature. That’s insane!!!! Com’on Mark! Thought you were better than that, dude.
Dave of Mind Petals
http://www.facebook.com is crashing a lot right now. it’s hard to get onto the API developer discussion boards (where there has been some fiery discussion).
discussion is continuing at http://www.talkface.com
Although All the information that is visible now was always visible before…. Not everyone visited my page every day, they didn’t know what group i just joined, and they didnt know who i did or did not just make a new friend, especially if I have 200+ “friends” i didn’t WAnt to keep track of all the people i know…. Its way too many and i know that If my close friends want to know something about me they will just go to my page…. I like the fact that they are trying o come up with new ideas but their was nothing wrong witht th old facebook…. It was perfect Just the way it was
I love this feature. I used to have to randomly click everyone’s facebook profile trying to find out what they’ve done recently and who they’re interacting with.
Now all I can use this feed and optimize my stalking. Thank you facebook.
Seriously, Facebook has just crossed the line from being a place where you can find out a little more about your friends and interact with them, to a place where you can watch their every movement.
I’m surprised a site who won over so many users, because it gave people this concept of privacy and walled gardens didn’t realize this would make people uncomfortable (especially without an opt out feature).
I’m sure Yahoo!360 has had this for ages.
my friends and I discovered this today at school. (yes our school doesnt block facebook) most of them didnt like it and i didnt really like it either. we dont really care about what some of these people did. i dont care that someone left a comment or upload a photo if im not really friends with them in real life. we should be able to customize who we want to see info on in the news feed.
i still am in two minds about this and really can’t make up my mind what i think about this. as a stalker i love it, as a user i hate the intrustion. in case anyone is interested i’ve blogged about this at meal-ticket.blogspot.com and would love to have a good discussion about this with someone!
EVERYONE hates this.
Just scrolling through my Friends list, dozens of people had their “status” set to something about not liking the new complicated facebook.
Just deactivated. What crap
People want to come to Facebook out of boredom and stalk through their friends pages. They don’t want a daily digest sent to them bedside every morning!!
Facebook really blew it here.
Mark Zuckerberg took a huge dump. 5 massive logs. 3:05 a.m.
Did anyone else notice Daniel Corson added “yay” to his favorite activities in the screenshot? Looks like Mr. Corson will be headed to rehab soon for his cocaine addiction ha ha ha.
Yeah, they have to do something to make it more obvious to disable this new feature. The college boards I frequent are full of people disliking how people can so easily view their activity and aren’t certain how to turn it off. I think this was a Facebook faux paux.
@Dave - stop spamming Techcrunch - no one cares about talkface.com - and your whole 18 members.
Oh and I like the new app. Your guys are what - 50 users out of 9 million. Who cares if you dont like ? Im sure there are 4 million others that do.
I’ve been a member of Facebook since 2004, back when it was still “THEfacebook.com” and before things like photo albums, cross-network membership, and status messages. Some changes, like photo albums, have been great, but I think that this new redesign was way off the mark because it was aimed more in terms of what COULD be done, rather than what would actually be most appreciated and used by Facebook users. Just because RSS technology exists doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the best thing to use, at least not in this particular form. When I logged onto the site today and saw the new changes, I was greeted with a message telling me about the updates, and in order to proceed, I had to click a button that said something along the lines of “Ok, cool!” But I didn’t think it was “cool” at all. Sure, I love using RSS to check up on my favorite blogs, but IMO, this type of technology just doesn’t work as well for receiving updates through Facebook. In this case, it really all comes down to being a matter of TMI: Too Much Information.
Mike: You said FaceBook users can disable this? Where’s that option? I don’t see it. Plus, it’s on by DEFAULT against the wishes of all users.
Also, who gives a crap whether or not this is a cool web 2.0 feature, if people don’t want it, DONT MAKE IT MANDATORY.
Also, clearly there’s a gap in thinking between the “web 2.0 gurus” on tech crunch and the user bases of these websites.
Among the numerous groups started today against this, the so called:
Students against Facebook News Feed (Official Petition to Facebook)
Appears to be adding members at about 10k an hour thanks to the popularity the group is getting through everyone’s news feeds.
IF THERES ONE LUCRATIVE BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY to take advantage of right now, its create a new facebook style college network that won’t violate the users trust, people will flock.
http://www.petitionspot.com/pe.....ewfacebook
A Face Is Exposed for AOL Searcher No. 4417749 - New York Times - if AOL can decide your private information isn’t so important or private anymore (AOL had been working on the product for 20 years - let’s still believe it was unintended for now), how much different are the newer companies then? Companies almost always test on the younger demographic [who haven't yet learned the sorrows of being a You Tube Star or internet famous and having all your 'private' information online in the hands of gross stalkers] is actually providing say i.e. really useful keyword /ad matching for the ‘private’ chat rooms. Even if you’re still interested in becoming the next YouTube star, or the infamous “private” chatroom person, note that online services still can have privacy implications. Or how about thinking about the agony of when 10 or 20 years down the road your future employer, family, or boyfriend researches you, learns your rants, and then turns you down.
Even the smallest intrusion into private space by the unwanted gaze causes damage, because the injury caused by seeing cannot be measured.
“Hezek Re’iyyah,” Encyclopedia Talmudit
There’s already another college social networking site out there (ConnectU.com… supposedly ConnectU hired Zuckerberg to create their site for them back in the end of ‘03, but instead, he launched his own social networking site, thefacebook.com).
Anyhow, the reason students aren’t flocking to them is due to a lack of users / content. Even though there’s a bunch of users complaining about this, most of the 9 million users will end up living with this, or not really care enough to switch over to a whole new network where most of their friends don’t have accounts. Or if Facebook does notice enough of a dropoff in user accounts, they’d probably introduce a disable feature.
This could be a good thing. Maybe it will get people my age thinking about the privacy issues. All the data being displayed is data that already exists. This feature just makes it blatantly obvious that it exists. I think a lot of the people on Facebook and other social networks don’t realize the potential ramifications of the data they make available. Employers are already checking out people’s profiles to vet them. Some have learned this the hard way:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06.....1307678400
Allen is absolutely correct. The long-term ramifications are huge and most teens and young people are so short-sighted that they don’t even consider these. One should always assume that ANY piece of information you post about yourself online is going to be permanently stored by somebody somewhere. You (or the site) may take it down. But somebody else could have downloaded it. It could be cached somewhere. The government and large corporations could be spidering all the data on these sites for future data mining (and probably are).
It’s hard to imagine now, but one day we will have somebody running for high political office that once had a Facebook or MySpace profile. What happens when all their drunken party photos and sexual escapades are revealed based on their Facebook profile?
http://www.OldFaceBook.com - The people are NOT happy…
There has been a few groups with protesting the change, Students against Facebook News Feed (Official Petition to Facebook), NEW FACEBOOK SUCKS. Description from one group: “You went a bit too far this time, facebook. Very few of us want everyone automatically knowing what we update. We want to feel just a LITTLE bit of privacy, even if it is facebook. News Feed is just too creepy, too stalker-esque, and a feature that has to go.”
Thank you much Real World Person, whomever you are (and I don’t care because it’s the content that matt