Posted by
Katie Favazza on Friday, September 08, 2006 12:52:51 AM
I wanted to post this earlier today, but alas, being a full-time student can get in the way sometimes.
Speaking of being a student...
I am currently debating whether or not to delete my own personal Facebook account. If the News Feed and the Mini-Feed are not removed from the site--or, at the very least, some varying options are presented to all users--I will have no problem ending my two year love affair with Facebook.
No idea what I'm talking about? This has gotten quite a bit of attention, because I'm not the only
student who feels violated by the new features added this
week.
WSJ (that's right, the WALL STREET JOURNAL!) reports:
New Facebook Features
Have Members in an Uproar
By JAMIN WARREN and VAUHINI VARA
September 7, 2006; Page B1
Facebook.com, the popular social-networking Web site for students, is suddenly getting the cold shoulder on campus.
On Tuesday, in an effort to make it easier for users
to keep track of their friends, the fast-growing site rolled out two
new features, dubbed News Feed and Mini-Feed. They track users' actions
on the site and then keep all of their friends apprised of those
developments.
If members acquire a new friend, drop an old one or
post an embarrassing photo, all the people in their social network --
including, in many cases, some whom they've never met -- can find out
about it almost instantly from a News Feed posting they receive on
their home page.
But Facebook's move sparked a backlash almost
immediately. Hundreds of thousands of Facebook users emailed the
company and formed protest groups yesterday to express their outrage.
Their key complaint: Personal information they had posted selectively
had in a matter of hours become uncomfortably public.
A student at Northwestern University teamed up with a
student at the University of Iowa to start a group called Students
Against Facebook News Feed, which had amassed more than 330,000 members
by yesterday afternoon. They were hashing over more than 1,550
discussion topics related to the changes. Meanwhile, a student at the
University of Florida launched "A Day Without Facebook" campaign to get
members there to organize a boycott of the site next Tuesday.
Other members circulated an online petition -- which
quickly gathered tens of thousands of virtual signatures -- to send to
Facebook demanding that users be given an option to disable the new
features. And Facebook's own blog was flooded with comments, forcing
founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg to post a response titled,
"Calm Down. Breathe. We Hear You."
(The boycott emphasis is my own. Let me know if any of you plan to join the boycott, and I'll give you a shoutout on Elocutio. Also, the article continues on the site, but you will need a subscription to read the rest.)
Jason, a Catholic U. student who joined some friends and I for lunch
today, noted, "If MySpace did this, little girls everywhere would be
raped." I know he was mocking the whole thing, but there's a bit of
truth in that. It's uncomfortable and, as it stands, there is no way to
opt out of participating--either by preventing your own information
from appearing on other people's feeds or by eliminating the feed of others' info from
your own profile altogether.
Students are voicing their discontent--and even the WSJ has heard them. Now, what is Facebook going to do about it?
*
Stay tuned, and I will let y'all know if my account is going down.
Man, no Facebook, no
Miller products,
no Sushi... Being hip to the blog world is rough. (Let me be clear: As a St. Louisian and AB loyalist, I never purchase Miller products anyway.)