If you haven’t heard by now, the ultra popular social network Facebook (generally for college students) got a pretty major facelift. I logged into my account to find a new Facebook “feed.” Apparently they didn’t want to be left out of the feed frenzy!The last time I checked, there were 26,000 names on the petition to have this feed removed, and it keeps growing! The general consensus with this new debut is that Facebook now crosses the line from “Social Network” to “Stalker’s Paradise.”
The news feed looks something like: “John added ____ to his favorite movies,” or “Susie and Kim are now friends” or “Lisa is now in a relationship” (complete with a heart) or “Dan added new photos” (complete with thumbnails of newly added photos), or “Jeff joined the group– The Croc Hunter, a legend of our time..RIP Steve Irwin.” It is literally a whole page- plus some of stalkish, useless information.
Some of the comments I have seen include “Facebook is the ultimate stalkers dream now.. sick” to “I’m thinking Facebook scares me.” There is even a group called “Students Against Facebook News Feed” with nearly 26,000 members (and counting) who say this is the official petition. In comparison, there is a group titled “Students in favor of Facebook News Feed” with 17 lonely members.
I’m sure there are some people who like every last juicy detail about every so called friend they have on their list. That’s why I think they need to make this an optional feature disabled by default. They’ve gone a little bit far now by making a feed of every single update and change a user makes. Change can be good, but in this case I think they went a little too far too quickly. They need to take a step back and take the feedback from the millions of users seriously.
| Update: |
If you’re a member of facebook, you can join this group by searching for “Students against Facebook News Feed (Official Petition to Facebook)” The number of members is growing by the thounsands!
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| Update 2: |
The latest count is 46,473 as of 9:40 central time- only one hour after originally posting this.
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You have to have a .edu email to register right?
That would take care of the old creeps.
Lets just pray myspace doesnt do something like this!
Hahaha.. that gave me a good laugh. Why yes you need a .edu email to register. I’m still asking myself why I’m a registered user
Facebook rules!
I enjoy all the additions they’ve made recently.
i see we need to be registered in .edu email. i didn’t have a good experience while registering there. can we just skip it or something?
Unfortunately you can’t skip it because they require you to be a student or faculty member at a school. That’s kinda what differentiates Facebook from MySpace.
It’s interesting and it takes some adjusting too. But is actually fun and pretty interesting if you are actually friends with the people you are ‘friends with’ (thus reducing the likelihood of ’stalking’)
That and the fact that Facebook doesn’t suck or look like crap.
What college do you goto Ryan?
Iowa State University, but I’m not on Facebook if you’re wondering.
For non-facebook users who want to find discussion of this new feature (and can’t look at the discussion in the facebook groups) there is activity at the Facebook discussion room [talkface.com]
I just wrote up a little script last night that does just that: transforms the News Feed to RSS.
PHP and all the source is there: [blog.nemik.net]
Nice script! I’m surprised that they didn’t implement that themselves.
Ryan,
I’m not; they want people coming to site as often as possible and looking at ads.
I guess you’re right, after all they will already be losing page views since the stuff is all on one page now.