There has been an overwhelmingly negative public response to Facebook’s launch of two new products yesterday. The products, called News Feed and Mini Feed, allow users to get a quick view of what their friends are up to, including relationship changes, groups joined, pictures uploaded, etc., in a streaming news format.
Many tens of thousands of Facebook users are not happy with the changes. Frank Gruber notes that a Facebook group has been formed called “Students Against Facebook News Feed”. A commenter in our previous post said the group was closing in on 100,000 members as of 9:33 PM PST, less than a day after the new features were launched. There are rumors of hundreds of other Facebook groups calling for a removal of the new features.
A site calling to boycott Facebook on September 12 has also been put up, as well as a petition to have the features removed. Other sites are popping up as well. There seems to be no counterbalancing group or groups in favor of the changes.
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has responded personally, saying “Calm down. Breathe. We hear you.” and “We didn’t take away any privacy options.”
I gave the new features a thumbs up yesterday and stick by my review. No new information is being made available about users. Facebook privacy settings remain in their previous state, meaning you can have your information available throughout the network or just among your closest friends. Don’t want a particular piece of information to be syndicated out even to them? Remove any single piece of data by simply clicking the “x” button next to it and it will not appear in the news feed.
If this feature had been part Facebook since the beginning, their users would be screaming if Facebook tried to remove it. It’s a powerful way to quickly get lots of information about people you care about, with easy settings to remove that information for privacy reasons. No one can see anything that they couldn’t see yesterday. It’s just being distributed more efficiently.
I also applaud Facebook for launching a product clearly designed to reduce total page views in the network by no longer forcing users to go to their friends pages for updates. That shows serious long term vision and dedication to the principle of facilitating communication among its users.
An easy fix to the problem is for Facebook to simply make each of the new products optional. Users who don’t participate will quickly find that they are falling out of the attention stream, and I suspect will quickly add themselves back in.
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”
shows how much you guys know about the college people.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
If it’s information people don’t want known, then why did they post it in the first place? Much ado about nothing…
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
See the discourse at http://www.talkface.com
You got it Michael.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.duan...brown.ca/?p=382
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“An easy fix to the problem is for Facebook to simply make each of the new products optional. Users who don’t participate will quickly find that they are falling out of the attention stream, and I suspect will quickly add themselves back in.”
I couldn’t agree with this more. And I also agree that in 6 months, users will be used to it and it’ll be popular. I think people just don’t like change, and this is very different than what everyone is used to.
I sent a message to the owner of the petition, it reads as follows.
The the new facebook is based on a need the administration saw at facebook. And your baselss argument of saying its against the privacy policy is complete bullshit, go read the privacy policy. You and your supporters are just looking like a bunch of grumpy kids.
If you want to make a sensible argument you need to justify why with abosulte reason why these changes are affecting you negativly and not point to an article about gmail, and the worry on the stockmarket because they fear ad viewing will go down when this isn’t even the basis of your argument.
I am glad you expect that your baseless argument will have any effect on a big company with a advertising partnership with Microsoft where all your saying is Oh its against the Privacy Policy, Which it isnt, and … Ummm. These other articles support my argument, which are about Gmail tracking your IM conversations. Tottally Baseless!
Jesus Christ. Get a life.
——
Good Huh?
Bests,
Frank
I’m with you here Michael. I think that this was a great move by facebook and I’m loving it.
I joined a couple of the ‘i hate new fb / its creapy’ groups just to mention that i liked it, then i left the group.
It may just be my imagination, or it may just be my particular web connection that’s acting up ONLY when I use Facebook, but I’m noticing that every time I’ve tried to mindlessly browse around facebook lately like I used to, it seems that everything is slower. I keep getting random pages of code and jibberish every once in a while when I click on someone’s profile, and it just doesn’t make it as entertaining to visit all my friends pages and look at all of my groups when it takes me 2-3 minutes to change from page to page. Like I said, it may just be my network, but it seems that all of this new information and new algorithms they’re touting have slowed down Facebook’s capabilities, and that just doesn’t make sense.
HA! True indeed.
“…you shouldn’t be putting it on a SOCIAL NETWORK WEB SITE in the first place. Grow up. ”
account deactivated.
To be honest, I think this may be the single greatest thing to happen in the social networking space since the explosion of facebook. The average user has no clue about privacy. Really, I’ve done informal surveys at my University and 7 out of 10 facebook users (which is just about everyone), has never given any serious thought to the privacy of the information they put on facebook. And now bam! There it all is, in the format undeniably useful, and yet quite scary. So what we’re seeing here are students all of a sudden waking up to the idea that they don’t want everyone they’ve marked as a friend to see private stuff about their life. I hope this leads users to put more thought towards online privacy.
And from the first hand accounts I’m hearing this has everything to do with privacy, and is not only about “change”, as some have been asserting.
-Ben
I really don’t think that Facebook should give users the option of, “opting out,” of the feeds feature. Clearly the majority of Facebook feels the feeds are not needed, and if they are given the chance to opt-out they will never really get to see how beneficial they really are, and will likely never return to using the feature. Allowing users to opt-out will have made implmenting the new feeds feature pointless, per se.
However, if Facebook is considering allowing its users to opt-out of the feeds feature, I think they should give them the option after several weeks, or possibly even months, of use. Hopefully by that time the majority of Facebook users who dislike the feeds will come to see how great they really are, and thus will hopefully continue to use this powerful new feature.
Exactly, and people that you befriended on Facebook because you just met them in a class or at a job, those people wouldn’t be searching your photos, events, relationship status, etc. Now, it’s in their face.
Also, I have a lot of friends that posted events and I can’t obviously go to all of them so I have to decline them, now its posted to the world that im declining my friends events, which I know is not what i want.
Ultimately, I quit my account because of this but more so by Facebook’s lack of response, and then their stand-offish position against user feedback. It will turned me off as to what kind of company Facebook is and now I don;t want them to have my information at all.
I think that this response…
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has responded personally, saying “Calm down. Breathe. We hear you.” and “We didn’t take away any privacy options.”
…shows a patronizing lack of understanding and clearly he isn’t “hearing” them. It’s not good to show contempt for your own audience. Voice is so important with this target market – something that MySpace excels at. I think there is a lesson here about how to roll out site changes in a social network.
I have to disagree that people will quickly find themselves using the news feed. Facebook users are addicts who spend hours of their day scrounging through this data. It’s the #1 procrastinator in colleges today, and that’s the way the users like it. Too much information, too quickly, defeats the purpose of putting in the effort of finding out about people.
In all honesty, the real issue might be that people have tons of friends who are just random people who they added to their list. I don’t care when that person adds “The Eagles” as a favorite band. That’s why when I see they updated their profile, I don’t look, and I don’t much care. However, the profile’s of people who one actively keeps up with are memorized to the last line, and any changes are immediately checked up on.
I think the issue here is an interesting paradigm in what Facebook is really providing for the end user, and whether the company realizes how its product is being used.
I myself am a facebook user and in the group u mentioned above, the reason that most people dont like this is because of the minifeed not the profile page one. Most people dont want everyone that looks at their profile to be able to tell exactly what they did at 4:02 and whos wall they posted on. If the mini-feed was made optional and the type of information that was made available through news feed was customizable into what types you want shown and maybe be able to turn it off if you must, would make this a much better update then it is currently.
It seems if Facebook is ad-based, this is a shot in the foot since you don’t have to scour through multiple pages to see what has been updated. People are stupid, if you don’t want the privacy issues, don’t use the service. This isn’t stalking, and I am sure if you read facebooks Terms of Service you will probably find something in there where you wave your rights. I think it is a very good design and streamlines the whole facebook interface. It’s not like is it giving away any personal information that you haven’t added to facebook yourself. The sad thing is people are so vain they assume they are special enough to be stalked.
This is nothing new – radical UI changes are disruptive.
College students or retirees, new UI implies the need to ‘learn’ and to embrace a new way of doing things. Given the fact that Facebook and other web 2.0 UI’s are information rich, learning them is just plain difficult.
The new features need to be rolled out gradually and validated. Massive moves like this could be exploited by competitors and could be very damaging.
Alex
Michael, I realize I’m late to the party on this thread, but just one question: how do you test facebook features? From what I can tell, you don’t have any friends on your facebook account
. And the Techcrunch network is just you.
although the Facebook response is a typical corporate we didnt do anything copout I have no respect for…
Betting against your users is a really bad idea. So if he thinks its just a blip he better be right, or mugbook, or headbook will kick his butt sooner rather than later. If he is right then these complainers are in the minority.
But ont you even have to keep the minority happy when they are your customers?
Ironically, I just used News Feed to check on the “Students Against Facebook News Feed” group.
As of 11:45 EST, it’s at 172,882 members.
“I also applaud Facebook for launching a product clearly designed to reduce total page views in the network by no longer forcing users to go to their friends pages for updates. That shows serious long term vision and dedication to the principle of facilitating communication among its users.”
I applaud you for clearly not understanding Facebook. If you look again, you’ll realize that this feature is a long list of teasers that never give you the full story. If you want all of the content, you have to click.
This was clearly designed to generate more page views.
Oh oops. I didn’t see Ryan’s post. You’re not really a facebook user (have no one in your network). I understand why you misanalyzed this now.
This reminds me work….
The only issue here is that it makes people understand the visibility of their data…. If it is not an issue for techies, for 99% of the users…
I work I can explain, educate and produce a wonderful “bullet-pointed PowerPoint” to make her understand…
But on the web, it is different.
I totally agree with Michael:
- this function is great.
- In six months people will proteste if it is removed.
- the function should have been an option to make the user want to activate it.
Finally I am not a big fan of the big bang changes when they break too much the habits (Ok I am not a marketing guy). I fare prefer the “little step strategie”.
You will not be in this blog, but it is great for you user…
What it sounds like to me is a few people initially got upset about it and then as it picked up a lot of steam people started joining the bandwagon without hearing the counterpoint which you have offered here. The not so technically-savvy people probably read all the biast bad things about the new features and joined the group misinformed. I don’t really know that’s just speculation.
If you can remove whatever you want from the feed and disable it I don’t see what the fuss is about.
Of all the people who joined the group to boycott facebook it will be funny if facebook revealed how many of those people did not log in the whole day.
I think a lot of comments here are missing the point.. the users do not like it. Perception is often more important than technical merit. Comfort is more important than technical merit.
I have several friends that have considered ‘quitting’ Facebook because of the feed. You can talk all you want about whether it’s not giving any new information, etc., etc., but in the end you have to give people what they want.