Facebook Users Revolt, Facebook Replies

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1. Ted Demopoulos
   

   September 6th, 2006 at 12:45 am

   Fascinating.
   To most Facebook users, Facebook is old and familiar.
   These changes are “new” and hence “disturbing” despite the lack of any new data available.

   Perhaps we should call these anti-Facebook-feed people the “Facebook Luddites”

2. Sam Donaldson
   

   September 6th, 2006 at 12:50 am

   shows how much you guys know about the college people.

3. Michael Arrington
   

   September 6th, 2006 at 12:56 am

   Let’s place a bet on how popular this feature is in 6 months, after the initial shock wears off. The average Facebook user spends more than 15 minutes per day on the site. They’re used to things a certain way and change is sometimes confusing.

4. Paul K
   

   September 6th, 2006 at 1:06 am

   It’s a good idea, but I think the default privacy is set to share alot of information. I think it’s set to share to your network (state or college) and friends of friends. This shock could be coming from people realizing their information isn’t as private as they thought and not knowing how to change it.

5. Michael Arrington
   

   September 6th, 2006 at 1:08 am

   It’s pretty damn easy to change the settings, but I agree a more restrictive default setting to sharing information would be a good idea.

6. Jason L. Baptiste
   

   September 6th, 2006 at 1:15 am

   I’m a fan of it personally. It increases information flow and allows me to see things at a glance. I don’t have time to look all around and wander to learn what my contacts are doing. The SAME information is there, nothing new. What I want, may not be what the masses of 7.5 million people want though. I think people need to calm down…

   -JLB

7. josephcp
   

   September 6th, 2006 at 1:17 am

   RE: the bold point.

   There *is* new information. It’ll show when you remove information. BAD BAD BAD BAD. What you remove is probably what you don’t want shown. Intuitively, it’s stupid. No one would be complaining if there’s a simple “disable feeds” feature. This question at first glance is about privacy, but fundamentally, it’s really about CONTROL. Many people are perfectly willing to have less privacy as long as they have control over it. College students really don’t care whether they broadcast their newest band in their profile to everyone, but you’ll be damn sure we care whether or not we can decide what kind of information to share.

8. Michael Long
   

   September 6th, 2006 at 1:28 am

   If it’s information people don’t want known, then why did they post it in the first place? Much ado about nothing…

9. Vineet
   

   September 6th, 2006 at 1:28 am

   Students against Facebook News Feed (Official Petition to Facebook)
   110,374 members as of 2:25 AM PST

   If this number reaches 1,000,000 members, it will be quite sad.
   Most likely it is already reached if all the various petition groups are combined.

   “Let’s place a bet on how popular this feature is in 6 months, after the initial shock wears off.”

   I’ll bet you Michael.
   How popular will the feature be versus how much “wall posts” and “pokes” will go down.
   We can do a survey at that point if Mark doesn’t feel like curbing to pressure.

10. joey d
    

    September 6th, 2006 at 1:29 am

    Has anyone heard of Doostang? I hear its like facebook for career stuff and all the top companies are using that these days to hire. Do you know how to get an invite?

    Joey

11. Sam Donaldson
    

    September 6th, 2006 at 1:51 am

    what i can say is that if this feature is not removed or if the user is not given the opportunity to disable it, there’s definitely going to be a lot of pissed college students. time for another player to do some PR and snatch them away while they can.

12. Michael Arrington
    

    September 6th, 2006 at 1:52 am

    Vineet - you’re on. Shall we say the loser pays for lunch? I believe page views might be impacted, but not pokes and wall posts.

13. Michael Arrington
    

    September 6th, 2006 at 1:53 am

    Sam, I think Facebook might have the most defendable position of any company I’ve ever written about. 85% of college students use it and love it. No one is going to dislodge them any time soon.

14. Sharpshoot
    

    September 6th, 2006 at 1:59 am

    See the discourse at http://www.talkface.com

15. Vineet
    

    September 6th, 2006 at 2:05 am

    You got it Michael.

16. josephcp
    

    September 6th, 2006 at 2:08 am

    RE: Michael Long

    I disagree, it’s not only the actual privacy that you need to look at. No one is disputing that there is no real effective privacy lost if, say, you’re already being obsessively stalked. The problem is a matter of perception. If I have to click a little X every time I have to remove something, yes it only slows me down for 2 seconds, but it really makes me feel like I have a lot less control of my own information.

    I’ve seen MANY comments today from my friends (ironically it’s much easier! thanks facebook!) about how everyone is suddenly going to remove information that they provide on their profile. Information that was there already and has absolutely nothing to do with the news feeds. Why did they say that? They PERCEIVE that they have less control over their own information. Having information you remove be persistent (as a feed that you have removed information) completely flies in the face of all HCI design principles. It makes people feel powerless, that they do not control their own information on facebook.

    And another thing, when the feature was enabled, it turned on retroactively. All actions made several days before were displayed. There was NO WARNING. Again, maybe I didn’t want the fact that I edited something a day ago public. There was a period of time where most users had no idea that information was displayed. It would have been better for the feature to log data from the point that it was enabled so any further action would be obvious to all users.

    Whether facebook actually, say, mines me and you for data doesn’t matter, it’s how people feel. If they feel like their data isn’t in their own control, then the service will be used less. That’s what I’m complaining about. What facebook needs to do now is a public “We screwed up” (whether they believe it or not doesn’t matter) and do a MASSIVE information overload in the privacy section. Let the users control every little bitty part of their news feeds. Heck, leave everything enabled by default, most people really don’t care about privacy — they care about having control. Having a big red button to disable everything doesn’t make me push it, but I’ll be happy as a clam if it’s there.

17. Harj
    

    September 6th, 2006 at 3:22 am

    I really can’t agree more with josephcp - perception is everything. another factor at play here is the fact that a lot of your facebook “friends” are not really your friends at all. if people only ever invited people they were actually close to onto their facebook network then there would be never have been this huge uproar. the simple face is that people love to show off how many friends they have and inevitably build up this big big networks of people they don’t actually know - people they don’t want being instantly informed of when they break up with their girlfriend or reject an invitation to a party.

    At the end of the day I think the idea of a feed itself is fantastic and all it needs is a tweak of allowing users to opt in or out of the feed. Once users feel like they have control again (and remember you’re dealing with a lot of different personality types - not everyone who uses facebook does it to stalk hundreds of profiles or constantly grab other folks attention) all will be good in facebook land again.

18. Vinuth
    

    September 6th, 2006 at 3:40 am

    When I read the previous post, I thought, “Oh! How would anybody welcome such a feature?”. Of Course, for geeks it may be a exciting feature to play with, but it isn’t a very sensitive thing to have. As someone said, “Stalking isn’t supposed to be easy!!”

    Though users can “X” out the unwanted stuff, it’s not the default. (Which you agree with too). Any thing that is shared has to go along _I-want-to-share-this_ route, with full user knowledge about what is shared and not vise versa. The psychological aspect also bothers me, just like the “stealth” mode in IMs. Being invisible or not sharing something will come to be identified and will be looked at as something “negative”. This I don’t agree with.

    I am glad they protested.

19. Scott Caplan
    

    September 6th, 2006 at 4:14 am

    I really like it personally. Before, if I saw that a friend’s profile was updated, I could click through and stare at the new profile still without knowing what on Earth was changed (if, for example, somebody added a favorite movie). Also, I wasn’t alerted when friends joined new groups (it wasn’t considered a profile change). Now, I am.

    The new system tells me what’s going on with my friends when it happens, and I find that immensely more useful than the old interface.

20. Duane
    

    September 6th, 2006 at 4:41 am

    People only complain when they are unhappy not when they are happy. So the fact that anyone who likes the new features are not saying anything is normal. If a 100,000 students don’t like it, think how many of the users do like it and add a good curve in their for nutrel students. I didn’t like the new features as much yesterday, but I found them a bit more useful this morning, after having slept on the idea.

    Also, Re: josephcp comment. Facebook shouldn’t say they did anything wrong, however, I do agree that they should work to improve on the features with the community. I think more students like the new features then don’t, but you never hear from the happy camp more times then not. If they admit they are wrong when they are not, creats more press about it for them. Also people will want them to admit they are wrong about everything they do as their will always be a small group you can’t please because you can’t please everyone in life.

    Blog post about the new facebook: http://www.duanebrown.ca/?p=382

21. Eric
    

    September 6th, 2006 at 4:49 am

    I’ve actually talked to a few people who sent me invites to groups against the new changes and pretty much every response was that it was different and thats why they didn’t like it. No one mentioned anything about privacy. As said many times above there is no new information displayed about people that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to find on your own.

    I for one hope they don’t remove the new changes like they’ve done with previous outcries against a new feature or design tweak…. Also you’d think as this kinda stuff has happend before maybe Facebook doesn’t do enough internal testing with actual users or perhaps should release features in a beta state and make it optional for use before releasing something live just to test the waters. On the other hand I’m sure all this drama has created a nice buzz and some media coverage… not that they really would need it.

22. Adam
    

    September 6th, 2006 at 4:57 am

    I, for one, just think it’s a crappy feature. I want to to go to my profile page when I click on “Home,” not this river of useless news junk.

23. Charlie
    

    September 6th, 2006 at 5:05 am

    And, you know, the value of your house is public information, too… as is someone’s criminal record, voting record, etc.

    That doesn’t mean it all needs to get dragged into the spotlight. I don’t want what I paid for my apt to be in my RSS feed.

24. Anthony
    

    September 6th, 2006 at 5:28 am

    There are “friends” and there are acquaintences. (sp?)

    There is having information searchable/available, and there is information being fed into a broadcast.

    There is the old facebook and there is the new facebook.

    There is control, and there is obviously in this case little control in what the users want.

    There is a reason the http://www.oldversion.com/ exists.

25. Brian
    

    September 6th, 2006 at 5:40 am

    I’m a student at Harvard (where Mark Zuckerburg started the website) and the facebook culture here is stronger than anywhere else… so I might be able to give some insight.

    There is a lot of talk about privacy issues, and while that may be a concern, it’s important to remember who we are talking about: college kids. They aren’t worried so much about their privacy…. if they did, they don’t put the information on facebook. Period.

    Facebook is more for browsing when you are bored or posting pictures of the drunken frat party last night. So I think that the issue isn’t so much the privacy concerns as it is the usability and interface.

    Facebook users don’t care about most of the information that is posted… who made a friend with who, why john doe dropped stat 100, etc.

    The birthday feed (it listed all friends with upcoming birthdays) was popular because it let people wish each other happy birthdays, but this has no applicability.

    Ultimatly, i think the idea will work because facebook will wise up an cut out the junk from the feed. Maybe adding a myYAHOO-esque feature that lets users add only certain members to their feed (not all their friends)

    I’ll take the bet that the feature is popular in 6 months… I’ll even give you odds.

26. Dare Obasanjo
    

    September 6th, 2006 at 5:44 am

    I agree that the main problem with the feature is that it is “new” as opposed to any privacy implications. We’ve faced similar problems when designing some of the features of http://spaces.live.com and my advice to the Facebook team would be that it may be better to allow people to opt out of being in feeds than to argue with users about whether it is a privacy violation or not.

    That’s a battle that they are not likely to win. Better to be seen as respecting your users wishes as opposed to being the kind of paternalistic overlords that know what is best for them.

    My $0.02.

27. Anon
    

    September 6th, 2006 at 5:50 am

    Hypothetically, pretend that users are able to opt-into the both parts of the system — you can choose whether your minutia is displayed, and you can choose whether you want to read the feed of your friends’ minutia. How many people will seriously choose to opt-in for the former feature given the general appreciation of Facebook as a safe, walled garden unlike the all-to-public pages of MySpace and others? And who but admitted stalkers will opt-in for the latter? What about when they realize that the only people they’re able to spy in on are people like themselves (and not the people they’re interested in).

    The reason the Facebook team hasn’t (and won’t) make this optional is because if they do, it’s tantamount to removing the feature all together.

28. Dave
    

    September 6th, 2006 at 5:53 am

    In addition to the perception issues previously addressed, the big issue in my mind is opt-out spam. What facebook has done is add all 300+ of my facebook friends feeds to my facebook “RSS” reader. Automatically. Could you imagine if real RSS feeds worked that way? RSS feeds have to be opt-in, and facebook data is no different. I would be very upset if, for example, after visiting this page every feed that every visitor to this site reads was added to my RSS reader.

    However, now that we have this platform, think about spam again. I now have 300 people reading my RSS feed. Anything I write goes straight to the top of their homepage, no questions asked, no filters to bypass. Make 10 posts about a party your frat is having, a bike you want to sell, or a political candidate you hate, and it’s plastered up and down hundreds of people’s homepages. So control has shifted: I, along with hundreds of your “friends”, now control the most valuable real estate on your facebook, and all you can do is try and stop the flood.

29. Sean
    

    September 6th, 2006 at 6:15 am

    I’m sorry but what a bunch of whiney, spoiled children facebook users are. The fact that these people are calling for a boycott is just sillyness. I think the feeds are a brilliant idea. I agree that you should haev options as to what info is “broadcast” to your network, and perhaps the defaults were a bit too “chummy”, but seriously folks, it’s a freaknig SOCIAL NETWORK WEB SITE. If you have problem with certain info being shared, you shouldn’t be putting it on a SOCIAL NETWORK WEB SITE in the first place. Grow up.