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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.”
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© 2006, The Philadelphia Inquirer.
