Okay, look… over the past, oh, 24 hours I have seen dozens of away messages, facebook groups, events, and so on lamenting new facebook. Ignoring that some of these folks might just not like the look of New Facebook — something which makes very little sense to me. The mini-feed you can minimize and that setting stays for your visits to other profiles. The stuff on the “home” page is replacing some of the most worthless links and info possible… so you used to have nothing, now you have something… if you’re not a fan of how it looks, bookmark your profile page instead of your home page.
To those of you who think this is “creepy” or “stalkerish”… let’s talk about something. You’re on a social networking site. One on which you, presumably, put personal details for your “friends” to see. With very, very few exceptions, people are not seeing anything they weren’t already entitled to know.
A few possible reasons for people’s problems with the new change jump out at me:
- A New Realization: Apparently some people are just now realizing that this information is available and pretty easy to find out. This baffles me, but I cannot dispute the prevalence of human ignorance.
- Double Standards: It seems like lots of people want the ability to snoop around on their friends, but want their activities to exist under-the-radar. Or, at the very least, they want to be able to believe that theirs do. This is silly.
- Friend-collecting: The other group of people who seem miffed about this are people who “friend” every damn person they meet and even some that they don’t. They don’t see their “friends list” as a list of their actual friends but, rather, a list of people of whose existence they have become aware. The problem, in this case, is the friend-collecting… not new facebook.
It seems, at some point, people have forgotten what social networking sites are for. And this to say nothing of the fact that I’ve seen a million people bitching about how facebook shouldn’t be condoning “stalking.” None of my classmates have said anything like that, thank god… and I shouldn’t have to say it… but reading information that you make publicly available is not stalking.
September 6th, 2006 at 10:38 am
Well said
September 6th, 2006 at 1:25 pm
I stated I don’t like the look of it, but that doesn’t mean I’m bitching about it. Oh, and when the page lined up like it should, the birthdays were on the right and that made me happy.
September 6th, 2006 at 3:18 pm
I personally think the features are a little annoying, so I minimized them… but to me I’d rather have someone have to take the time and go look at my profile and see for themselves what I’ve changed on my profile than get a big huge announcement everytime I write on someone’s wall or update some minor detail of my favorite music or something… Seems unnecessary and a little weird to me, but that’s just my $.02…
September 6th, 2006 at 3:33 pm
Which would, in many cases, require them to know exactly what was on your profile at all times… and if you really don’t want someone to know about something, delete it out of your mini-feed… I think that takes it off of your friends’ feeds, too.
September 6th, 2006 at 6:22 pm
Here is a live counter of the number of people who have joined the “Students against Facebook News Feed” group on Facebook….. 300,000 and climbing
http://digg.com/tech_news/Face.....VE_Counter
September 6th, 2006 at 6:24 pm
Wow. 300,000 idiots on facebook. I’m shocked. (Not really)
September 7th, 2006 at 9:51 pm
well said old sport. if you don’t want people all up in yo biznass then why you postin it on the facebook?
September 8th, 2006 at 6:23 pm
This is the kind of thing we discuss in my department frequently (and in fact this topic in particular) in regards to online privacy (or lack of). I think a lot of people feel that there is a difference between posting something online in a place where someone can look at it, and that information being broadcast out to a large group of people.
Personally I find it both fascinating and slightly creepy. I think facebook should offer an opt out for the people who don’t want their information in the feeds. (Much like Google indexing a website… do it first, opt out later)