Facebook users want about-face on tattle tool

[12 September 2006]

By Amy S. Rosenberg and Daniel Rubin [The Philadelphia Inquirer]


Ben F. may have changed his relationship status to single, but, really, does every one of his friends on Facebook need to be informed of it in a headline at 4:35 in the morning?

Yes, this week, the hanging-all-our-laundry-out-there generation got a little too much face in its Facebook as the popular Web site added a feature that, like a personal news ticker, chronicles every online move they and their friends make.

“It brings Facebook stalking to a whole new level,” said Chris Favilla, 21, as he sat on a leather couch outside the Phi Delta Theta fraternity on Locust Walk on the University of Pennsylvania campus Thursday, where the already-epic Facebook news-feed controversy was a hot topic.

Nine million students hang out online on Facebook, each with his or her own Facebook “wall” of pictures and posts. The new feature allows users—leaves them no choice, really—to find out what friends have been doing through “news feeds” and “mini feeds” that appear on their page automatically.

All day, every day, every last little blip in their online lives—who posted on whose wall, who made a new online friend, who woke up tired—like a personal CNN for every one of their designated friends.

“It’s so extreme,” said Mike Carley, 22, a Penn senior from Los Angeles. “I don’t really need to know my friends at USC are going to a party. It’s really too much information. A bunch of people don’t care whose wall I posted on at 3:45 a.m. What if I reject a friend request, will it say that too? That’s ugly.”

So upset are users about the changes that as of yesterday more than a half-million of the sites’ 9 million users had signed petitions against the change, or joined online groups against Facebook (actions which, of course, were instantly logged on all their friends’ walls).

A Web site called A Day Without Facebook is calling for a mass boycott of the network on Tuesday—which, given the addictive nature of the site, would be an impressively harsh protest strategy.

But Facebook users—many of whom reject the more open-to-all MySpace—feel betrayed (Facebook is the No. 2 social networking site after MySpace, owned by News Corp.) Facebook originally limited its membership to college students, but four months ago spread to the military, nonprofit organizations, and some corporations.

“What was so great about Facebook was that it was not as blatantly put in your face what everyone was doing,” said Mary Calderone, a freshman at Penn. “MySpace was so stalkerish. People are joking and calling it MyFace now.”

All this information was already available, but most of it was hidden deep within users’ walls, accessible really only to people who had the idea to check out, say, how many friends had posted on someone’s wall.

Now, the news feeds automatically let users know when their friends have added photographs, changed their lists of favorite movies, or taken someone off their friends list because of a breakup. And stuff like: “Five of your friends have posted on Meghan’s wall.” (Should you? Do you really need to know that?)

This made personal news travel faster—and more awkwardly—through their network of friends than a lot of Facebook fans were ready for.

“I absolutely hate it,” said Nawad Maalouf, 19, a junior at Penn. “I don’t want every detail out. It used to take some effort to stalk someone. Now the stalking just comes to you. You see if people have declined invitations, updated their relationship status, written on other people’s walls.”

But isn’t sharing information the whole point of Facebook.com? That you can know all about people—when they’re online, who their friends are, what music they’re into—before you’ve even gone out for coffee?

Amanda Lenhart, senior research specialist with the Pew Internet & American Life Project, said the controversy underscores “the imperfect ideas” that users have about how their material is being used.

“All the things they are making public are things that are already public. What is also important is that Facebook took away a measure of their control.”

The changes also brought up some serious privacy issues: Maalouf said she had friends who had accepted invitations to gay events who did not necessarily want their sexual orientation broadcast to a vast network of casual acquaintances.

Then again, the whole nature of what is a “friend”—which on Facebook means you have authorized a person to hang on your online wall—may be at the heart of the controversy.

“On Facebook, you only have one kind of friend,” said Pew’s Lenhart. “It assumes this intense level of friendship for everyone on the network. People can’t do things that might not be noticed. What Facebook has assumed is that everyone cares. And they don’t.”

The fury of the backlash led Facebook’s founder, a former Harvard University student named Mark Zuckerberg, to post an e-mail assuring the angry crowd that the company was “listening to all your suggestions about how to improve the product.”

He headlined the post, “Calm down. Breathe. We hear you.”

Yesterday, Facebook spokeswoman Melanie Deitch said the company was “aggressively evaluating” the change.

But she stressed that the news feed addressed “one of the main reasons people use Facebook, which is to find out what’s happening with their friends.” She said privacy controls were available to screen out information among categories of people.

And she added that at least one of the signature Facebook interactions was still and would always remain private—that nonverbal heyhowyadoin’ known, affectionately, as “the poke.”

___

© 2006, The Philadelphia Inquirer.

 
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Comments

It’s a free service. Deal with it. Oh, and life without Facebook and Myspace is pretty nice. A few million of you should try it sometime.

Comment by Rob from usa — September 12, 2006 @ 6:50 am

I think the idea was good, but was implemented poorly.  The feeds should be available, but turned off by default.  A Facebook user could then choose which data they want to publish for other users to read.

Comment by The Steeple from USA — September 12, 2006 @ 7:08 am

If you did not want your personal information to be known, why do you post it to the site in the first place? Duh.  If I did not want people to know something, I would not post it on the web.

Comment by Knarf from Atlanta — September 12, 2006 @ 7:18 am

I love the news feeds! It lets me keep up with everyone. If there’s a new group that everyone’s joining or whatever, I can get in on it, too.

Comment by Meg from Louisiana, USA — September 12, 2006 @ 7:22 am

Way to go Facebookers, your now even more retarded than those that post on myspace.com.  At least they don’t complain about “stalking” when they post their information on a publicly accessible site.  If you retards stopped adding friends to simply up the number you have, you wouldn’t have to worry about the wrong people getting the wrong information.  The author of this article is nothing more than a scandal monger, go back to community college journalism…

Pretty blatant by saying “leaves them no choice really”.  You’re an idiot; probably why you work for a site that only gets traffic because of google news.

If they were stalkers wouldn’t they be checking for update constantly anyway?  If you have a stalker as a friend does it really matter if they have a news ticker to keep them updated on stuff you basically send them an invitation to look at anyway?

Facebook is for college students only right?  Makes it seem like secondary education in this country is failing when they get upset at crap like this…

Comment by PleaseCryLess from USA — September 12, 2006 @ 7:30 am

If you don’t want your personal information accessible to strangers then don’t post it on a worldwide computer network.

Comment by Ben from Hell — September 12, 2006 @ 7:32 am

IT is a little extreme. As a two year facebook user, I like how I can look at other people’s mini feeds, but I am quite uncomfortable with how people can look at mine. I wouldn’t boycott the web site, I would just be more careful with every action I take on facebook.

Comment by Jacqeuline from Baltimore, MD — September 12, 2006 @ 7:41 am

Old news! The article spent way too much time talking about a story people were outraged about “last week”. Geeze doesn’t the author read Google News? Why not focus on the changes that have been made after the outlash?

Since then Facebook has done what is needed to keep people in the loop about this new feature and even added the ability to turn it off or limit what is shared with the tool.

Rallies and protests have been cancelled by people who thought the tool went too far, after the changes and Facebooks acknowledgment of a problem with how they handled this recent upgrade. Yet by reading this article I only get the feeling that Facebook is still in the doghouse with this one.

PS: I don’t even have a Facebook account so I"m not pro-facebook. I kinda wish MySpace had some kind of feature like this though, since most of my friends make small changes to their accounts and I never visit ALL my friends profiles so I never know what is going on in their lives.

Comment by Tom Smith from PA — September 12, 2006 @ 7:44 am

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I feel bad for people/kids/idiots who are so involved with myspace/facebook/online crap. Internet serves a purpose, and sitting in front of a screen all day trying to accumulate “friends” online and monitoring what everyone thinks/does is just… WEAK.  I wish myspace and facebook would shut down and kids would re-discover *GASP* the OUTDOORS!!!!

Comment by Feelbadguy from where you are — September 12, 2006 @ 7:50 am

People on MySpace add friends just to accumulate them, people on Facebook tend to add actual friends.  Mostly b/c it used to be a college thing and you’d meet your friends through college activities/classes.  Now that they’ve added military, high school, and corporations though….who knows?

Anyway, the backlash wasn’t as serious as this article makes it sound (perhaps the author was making up for the fact that he was 7-10 days late by writing a dramatized article?).  We did join groups about how it sucked, but those in the Facebook community tend to join groups whose titles reflect what we’re feeling regardless of how serious we are about it.  No one stopped using it since we obviously were still getting news about our friends.

Comment by Tatiana from Atlanta, GA — September 12, 2006 @ 8:28 am

I am a Facebook user and the solution is easy… if you don’t want the information put out there, don’t post it. I enjoy the feeds, I live a really busy lifestyle that is fast paced and takes me all over the country and I don’t have time to read everybody’s pages to catch up on what’s going on with my friend’s lives. I love the mini-feed.

Comment by Micah from USA — September 12, 2006 @ 9:07 am

Really everyone.  Get a life…and don’t post it online.

Comment by Ben from Memphis — September 12, 2006 @ 9:15 am

Some, no - many, people obviously should be educated on the meaning of public domain.

Comment by rudeshock from Philippines — September 12, 2006 @ 9:51 am

I believe everyone who had something to say agaisnt facebook had nothing better to do than to “exercise” their rights since everyone else was doing it.  If you didn’t want people to know about your daily routine then don’t talk about it but all you people blogged and cried about it, and it still hasn’t changed.  You can still see what people are doing just by going on or if pepole limit their output of info its still gonna be seen by word of mouth or other.  I think everyone who joined an anti facebook needs to understand its not facebooks problem its probally you and a bunch of friends who didn’t want everyone to know you got some last night.

Comment by Calvin — September 12, 2006 @ 10:56 am

Well first off, if you’re going to call other people retarded, use the right you’re.

“Way to go Facebookers, your now even more retarded than those that post on myspace.com. “

Secondly, if you aren’t into facebook, don’t comment about it.  Its a bad habit to go around bashing things that you don’t know anything about. 

Third, you can turn your feed off.  And not look at it.  Or you could not update your information.  Or you could withdaw your account from the site.

I think people made a big deal about all this because they like the site and they’d like to see it develop in a certain way.  On the other hand, those that run the site are just trying to make a better product and add functionality.  The two sides didn’t meet up on this one, but I think it will be figured out sooner than later.

Comment by Jay from USA — September 12, 2006 @ 10:57 am

This article focuses on ideas and information that have since passed. Moreover, people need to not worry about people looking at them so much. Do some people actually think that others are so interested in YOU? You must think highly of yourself if you do. TURN THE NEWS FEED OFF. You can do that, now.

Comment by Patrick from USA — September 12, 2006 @ 1:02 pm

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BoooHoo so ya facebookers post online, but now ya cry BoooooooHooooooooooo!  give me a bottle BoooHoooo, I typed this on line, now all my friends can read what i wrote!  BoooooHooooo, geeeeeze, what retards! IT’S THE INTERNET STUPID!!!

Comment by slime from usa — September 12, 2006 @ 1:07 pm

go to myface.com its the next biggest thing i heard already 200,000 members in 6 months

Comment by ber — October 10, 2006 @ 7:19 pm

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