Facebook Changes Provoke Uproar Among Users

coastal984 writes, "Facebook, the college (and now, high school and professional) networking site, launched changes to their web site this morning, provoking a massive and immediate response, and not the one the company had hoped for. Hundreds of protest 'Groups' formed, the largest of which have over 10,000 members, and sites like this student portal sprang up to pour scorn on the recent changes. The biggest gripe is the new "News Feed" on every page that tracks recent changes, activities, and comments made by everyone the user is connected to, such as a change in a user's relationship status." These details were all public previously, but it was only through intentional browsing that they would be discovered. In the words of one user, "Stalking is supposed to be hard."

Facebook

[epsilon720]

Yeah, I noticed these changes last night right before I went to bed. It is, simply put, damn creepy. Obviously all of the information given by the news feed would be normally available to the attentive and compulsive facebook browser, but having it all summarized is just bizzare. Person X has joined the "Asexual Students" club. Person Y has endorsed this candidate. I guess it's a little less weird when it's not simply a list of everything my school acquaintances have done in the last 24 hours.

facebook changes

[FalconDelta]

The fact is it's too much information. I don't want to see what everyone is doing every five seconds and neither does anyone else. Assuming I had something like 500 friends I'd see a lot of information about people I rarely if ever talk to on a daily basis. Moreover, the system keeps track, for a time, of deleted information - prompting users of the change. While it's true that all the information on a persons profile is "public" to their friends at least, it takes the mystery out of poking around facebook to see what has changed etc. They should at least make an option to enable/disable your facebook digest in other peoples feeds. A good idea in principle, but in practice it's a dud in my opinion.

What's so bad

[Anonymous Coward]

As a college student and a participant of facebook I am one of the surprisingly few people who LIKE that's right LIKE the new layout. It makes it feel more like my google homepage/thunderbird rss reader. While some of the information is extraneous I think a trimmed down version of this idea would be appropriate. Oh and most people don't realize this but there is a arrow at the top of the section like the one next to "sections" in the left column here on slashdot that allows you to collapse the information. Finally when you are using any social networking site you are distributing private information about you to the public and I think this serves as an excellent wake-up call to users who have been unaware of the consequences of doing so.

Information Overload.

[Enoxice]

Personally, I don't have a problem with the information being there. I just have a problem with that HUGE amount of information in my face all the time. I don't care who added a new book to their favorites; if I wanted to know someone's favorite books, I read through their profile.

The site design of Facebook is getting closer and closer to being as ugly as myspace/youtube.

Re:difference between "not private" and "announced

[MankyD]

For example, when a couple splits up, everyone in your network now gets a message saying "John Smith has changed his status from 'In a relationship' to 'Single'."

This one's a real toughy but let me point out how to fix this: if you don't want people knowing about your relationship status DON'T PLASTER IT UP ON A PUBLIC WEBSITE. Seriously, this is not that hard of a concept. If you don't enter that you broke up into face book, the world will never know...

And furthermore, if you really have to tell people but don't want to tell people, you can delete "events" from showing up in the feed by clicking the little x. (Yes, that interjection I added there confuses me too.)

Not so much the lack of "privacy"...

[Admodieus]

...but the fact that your home page is constantly updated by every little thing each of your friends does. Add a new photo? Bingo, alert, plus a thumbnail of the photo to clutter the page. Write something on another person's wall? You'll get a copy of the message on your main page. Most of us, if we care about every little detail of a friend's life, will intentionally browse that person's profile ourselves, as we spend enough time aimlessly surfing the site anyway.

Screw your customers

[sasdrtx]

I don't use facebook, and therefore I have no personal opinion about the changes being good or bad. But I think the real issue is that thousands of users took to using facebook because they liked the way it looked and worked. Then overnight it's a lot different from what they expected, wanted, and signed up for. Because the owners are arrogant and stupid.

Maybe they'll learn something about running a business. We'll see. They'd better learn fast. I reckon facebook users can switch to myspace in about 15 minutes.

This reminds me of the 3 months I spent researching, trying, and evaluating online banks. I decided on E*Trade because I liked their interface the best. And sure enough, less than 6 months later, they did complete interface overhaul (New! Improved! Blecchh). To the worst I'd ever seen. It was obviously some web geeks's fun with the latest and greatest web bells and whistles. Fortunately, after two more overhauls (and several years), it is back into pretty decent shape. The difference was, it's harder to switch banks than social networking sites.

Re:Yeah, stalking IS supposed to be hard

[AnyoneEB]

No, you do not understand. It is one thing to have one's profile say "In a Relationship with So and So" one day and "Single" the next, with no way for the viewer to know what it said previously without having viewed that profile earlier. It is different to show "Person broke up with So and So" on their profile. Stop saying that the information was already public. It was not. This is adding more information which a large number of users do not want shared.

Good thing Facebook made the new changes

[mozumder]

Security through obscurity will be the death of us...

It's actually a good thing for Facebook to do this, especially for college kids, since it does teach them about the need for privacy when dealing with the public internet. I hope they keep this feature, since it will help these kids to be more aware of the fact that, yes, data is public on the internet, and that this information is actually pretty easily accessible to ACTUAL stalkers/spammers/scammers/etc..

FREE service, PRIVATE profiles

[crashnbur]

I love the news feed. It makes a wealth of information already available to us more conveniently available. That said, it isn't perfect, and here are a few complaints I have had about it, some of which have an implied solution that I hope the Facebook overlords are considering:

1. I don't like how about a week's worth of recent events were already on our newsfeeds before we had a chance to approve it. Some people who still have not logged into their Facebook accounts for a couple of days have recent activities being broadcast to their friends list because of a feature they never approved.

2. I don't like how we don't have any control over what is automatically fed to our feed. We should be able to work through a series of checkboxes to determine what we do and do not want on our own mini-feed (while, of course, maintaining the ability to delete something from the feed).

3. I don't like the feed now lets people know about changes to NON-FRIENDS' profiles, specifically in the form of wall comments. For instance, if someone makes a comment on my wall, that other person's friends shouldn't see it in their feed unless that person is also MY friend. Friends of friends don't need to know about changes to my wall. The reason: that information was NOT available to them before, so it shouldn't be now.

4. The feed takes away some of the mystery of poking around on Facebook to find information the good old-fashioned way. Then again, I don't have that kind of time on my hands, so the new feature makes it much easier for me to keep track of profile changes people want me to see. This is not a problem for me; I just understand how some of you feel about the stalking-made-easy impression some of you get. But, well, the information was already out there.

5. I don't like how Facebook has been reduced to a mob mentality with an average IQ less than my shoesize. Facebook has fairly extensive privacy options (click the "My Privacy" link at left and look around). Every user's profile is PRIVATE to begin with, and every user can control what others can see. You can edit the default settings for each network of which you're a member, and for everyone. You can also set up your "Limited Profile" and select certain friends to see only that restricted view of your profile.

But, seriously, if you don't want someone to see something you're doing on Facebook, then why are they on your friends list (or not on your Limited Profile list)?

I love the new features. Keeping track of updates people want me to see is now much easier!

I love you, Facebook. :)