Facebook Mini-Feed concerns users Grace Dow
/ Columnist
Since its creation in February 2004, the social-networking
Web site Facebook has enabled more than nine million college
and high school students to connect.
The Web site, created by Harvard undergraduate Mark
Zuckerberg, includes a variety of features: a personal
profile which can include anything from favorite music to
political views, a messaging system in which you can send
messages to other “Facebook friends,” a
“wall” upon which any of your friends can leave a
note, a series of groups you can create or join, an events
page where you can receive or send invitations and photo
albums where you can upload pictures and “tag”
friends.
And now, as if all of that weren’t enough, there are
two new features on Facebook: a News Feed and a
Mini-Feed.
Since their abrupt debut on the Facebook site last Tuesday,
the innocuous-sounding News Feed and Mini-Feed have provoked
a great uproar.
Within the first day of the announcement, groups like
“Facebook has Gone Too Far” and “Students
Against Facebook News Feed (An Official Petition to
Facebook)” were springing up all over the place.
On Elon’s campus last week you might randomly have
heard someone say, “Hey, have you seen what’s up
with Facebook?” or “Facebook is freaking me
out!”
So, what’s the big deal?
The News Feed is a tool designed to alert you to the recent
doings of your other Facebook friends. There, in a neat,
orderly list, that appears every time you sign on to
Facebook, you can see that Kelly posted new photographs at
6:43 p.m., or that Jim updated his profile to include
“The Format” in his favorite music at 11:49
a.m.
You can also see who Alex added as a friend last night, or
when Greg wrote on Alicia’s wall. One particularly
cringe-worthy announcement might read “John is now
single (2:43 a.m.).”
However, the Mini-Feed is all about you. It is a new window
on your personal profile page that updates itself
automatically to include every group you’ve joined,
every invitation you’ve accepted, every wall-post
you’ve made, and every new friend you’ve
added.
This Mini-Feed is only accessible to you and the people on
your Friends list.
The interesting thing about all of this is that nearly
everything described above (updating profiles, posting
photographs) is something that Facebook users are meant to
see anyway.
This is something Mark Zuckerberg actually addressed in a
blog post last Wednesday, the day following the first
announcement. “None of your information is visible to
anyone who couldn’t see it before the changes,”
he wrote. “Nothing you do is being broadcast; rather,
it is being shared with people who care about what you
do—your friends.”
So what makes this new format feel so threatening? Why the
constant comparisons between Facebook and George
Orwell’s “Big Brother?” People tend to
wonder exactly how much information is going out to others,
and why.
Does everyone on your friends list really need to know that
you wrote on one person’s wall? The News Feed might
prove helpful in calling attention to smaller details
(“Dave added ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ to his
list of favorite movies”), but in other ways it can
seem invasive or annoying.
Users always joke about Facebook being a
“stalker’s tool,” but while MySpace and
other similar online networks have been linked to internet
predators, Facebook has a fairly spotless record so
far.
Zuckerberg insists that despite these new changes, Facebook
users will still receive the same privacy protection.
In an open letter to Facebook users posted on Facebook last
Friday, he apologized, “We did a bad job of explaining
what the new features were and an even worse job of giving
you control of them.”
Because of the feedback they received, they said, the
Facebook team has now added News Feed and Mini-Feed privacy
settings so that you may choose what particular news items
you want to appear on each of the Feeds.
Will this satisfy the thousands of angry Facebook users
across the country?
We’ll just have to wait and see about that.
Contact Grace Dow at pendulum@elon.edu or
278-7247. | 
