Too Far? Facebook responds to mounting student complaints about feeds

In a move that some call innovative and others call intrusive, the social networking Web site Facebook has drastically altered the way users communicate with each other.

The Web site has created the News Feed and Mini-Feed features, which update continuously over the period of a day posting the online actions of users’ friends. Unfortunately for Facebook, hundreds of thousands of students have protested the new features, ironically organizing their dissent within Facebook itself.

“It’s too much information,” junior biology major Hamere Mekonnen said about the feeds. “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it.”

The News Feed, released Sept. 5, focuses on the user’s friends. It consolidates all of their Facebook happenings since midnight the night before and lists them chronologically as news headlines.

The Mini-Feed shows each friend’s past actions and compiles them onto the user’s profile. Headlines for the feeds include adding friends, changing profile information, making plans to attend events, and posting, tagging or commenting on photos.

After using the Web site since he was a freshman, junior psychology major Jack Cody Jenkins now feels that Facebook has become too intrusive.

“Me and my girlfriend just broke up, and just about everybody knew it,” Jenkins said. “It was really annoying because everybody was like, ‘Cody’s single now. Let’s go hit on Cody.’

“I don’t need to know every little thing that happens to every one of my friends,” Jenkins added. “If they want to tell me, they can just tell me themselves.”

Facebook creator and CEO Mark Zuckerberg promoted the feeds before their release and has since called them “the next evolution of Facebook.”

Shortly after the feeds went online, the Web site’s feed product manager Ruchi Sanghvi echoed Zuckerberg’s sentiments when she announced the changes on the Facebook Web blog page. The posted blog reads:

“It updates a personalized list of news stories throughout the day, so you’ll know when Mark adds Britney Spears to his Favorites or when your crush is single again.”

Just hours after her post, many Facebook student groups formed against the feeds. Groups like “People who hate the facebook facelift” and “AAAA! Facebook is Stalking Me!!!” have since garnered hundreds to thousands of members. Users have posted messages with similar themes on the “Wall” message boards, where users have graphically criticized and even bid farewell to Facebook.

Topping the list with the most members, “Students against Facebook News Feed (Official Petition to Facebook)” has joined more than 730,000 college and high school students from across the country. They comprise nearly 8 percent of Facebook’s 9.5 million registered users and have quickly made the group one of the largest on the Web site.

On the first day of the feeds, Zuckerberg posted a second Web blog in response to angry students, including their claims that product manager, Sanghvi, was the devil. The blog was titled, “Calm down. Breathe. We hear you.”

“We’re not oblivious of the Facebook groups popping up about this (by the way, Ruchi is not the devil). And we agree, stalking isn’t cool; but being able to know what’s going on in your friends’ lives is.”

Many seem to agree with Zuckerberg, considering that nearly as strong a reaction to the News Feed has come from those in its favor. With only 1,500 members, “Students Against ‘Students against Facebook News Feed’ ” pales in comparison to the original but joins a growing number of similar pro-News Feed groups, changing a mostly negative reaction into heated debate.

Facebook spokesman Chris Hughes reported that Facebook, the 72nd most trafficked site on the Internet according to the Alexa.com Global Top 500 report, has continued to grow since instituting the feeds.

“We’ve actually seen an uptake in usage and new users,” Hughes said.

In the past week, however, Zuckerberg publicly apologized to Facebook users, saying the Web site “messed up” in terms of privacy controls. He pointed out, however, that not everything one does on Facebook becomes public knowledge. Only one’s chosen friends will receive news about them-information that was already available to them. As well, the News Feed does not display actions such as sending private messages, viewing friends’ photos and rejecting friend requests.

New privacy controls have also been added and can be accessed through “My Privacy” where a user can decide which information the feeds will announce.

While a user can keep many actions private, others are still up to Facebook’s discretion. Adding information to profiles, posting photos, joining groups or networks, creating or attending events, posting status updates and writing notes are all currently announced in the News Feed with no option to keep them private.

“We definitely should have given more granular controls before launching anything,” Zuckerberg said. “We’re still working on fixing this. The other night we added the ability to remove the Mini-Feed from your limited profile, for example. We’ll probably add more as we have time.”

In response to the privacy changes Facebook made, “Students Against Facebook News Feed” waited for Wall postings and then made a consensus decision how to respond.

“News Feed privacy is still not completely protected, a person can still see if you join a group, changes you make to your profile and pictures you upload, among others. Although we thank Facebook for all it has done so far (and how fast it did it), this group will continue to advocate for more privacy features to protect us from news feed.”

While Zuckerberg said the details would change over time, he still has no plans to remove the News Feed.

“Up until last week, people had to browse around the site and read through people’s profiles,” he said, “but with these new products we can surface a lot of that information for people. It makes Facebook a lot more efficient for seeing what’s going on around you.”