Wednesday Sep 6 2006 - 11:27am
Facebook’s Users Don’t Know What’s Good For Them
by 
under 
with Yesterday, Facebook implemented a new “feeds” feature to their site. Now, when you log on, instead of seeing a mostly-static page with little timely info, users are presented with a chronological list of any and all events relevant to their network of friends (new photos, new info, new friendships, relationship status changes, etc.) It’s a nice feature that brings all of the relevant information right to the user in a cool and useful format.
Today, the proverbial feces hit the fan. Apparently, a growing (and very vocal) minority of Facebook users are protesting these changes. A new group called “Students Against Facebook News Feed” has formed and amassed over 100,000 members in under a day. Boycott sites and angry petitions are popping up as well. Why the complaints? Here’s what one boycott site has to say:
There is one major reason there is a sense of anger over the Feeds feature.
It damages what privacy was left on Facebook. Before Feeds, it was already easy enough to stalk anyone at your school, and everyone on your friends list; but with the advent of Feeds, it is now nearly impossible not to be “stalked” or to “stalk”
Without even trying an individual now knows the changing relationship status of individuals on their friends list, the new “friendships” added by users, and the photos tagged by either a user or a user’s friends.
It is almost impossible now to keep your information to yourself. In the last year this has become incredibly important as we have seen judicial actions brought against students based solely on photos posted on facebook, we have heard of cases concerning actual stalking where Facebook was the accused main form of information, and we have seen employers who have begun using Facebook to check on potential employees.
Before Feeds there were steps that could be taken to prevent your information becoming everyone’s property; now there is literally no option to prevent your information from going completely public.
This feature was not requested by the users, and the users are not given a chance to opt out of it.
There are other reasons users are complaining, ranging from the fact it takes away the time-wasting aspect of Facebook to aesthetic complaints about the new look.
Clearly there is a desire to not have Feeds be the Facebook standard.
Lets summarize these complaints, shall we?
- It takes away the last remaining shred of privacy on the site.
- It takes away the “time-wasting” aspect of the site.
- Some people think it’s ugly.
Well, as for the last complaint, I would respond that I guess it’s a matter of personal preference. I think the new feature looks great and fits in with the overall look of the site.
As for the other two complaints, they’re really part of the same issue. I don’t think that many Facebook users realize: there will always be info stalkers. Information is never really safe online. All that the new Facebook feature does, if anything, is take some of the power away from the hardcore stalkers by leveling the informational playing field. That’s a good thing!
I feel like Mark Zuckerberg’s response really hits the nail on the head:
And we agree, stalking isn’t cool; but being able to know what’s going on in your friends’ lives is. This is information people used to dig for on a daily basis, nicely reorganized and summarized so people can learn about the people they care about.
Yes, exactly! Facebook’s privacy settings have always allowed hiding yourself from pretty much everyone except for your friends. This new update didn’t change that ability. And if you don’t feel comfortable having some of your friends see concise updates of your Facebook changes then a) maybe you shouldn’t have friended so many random people and b) maybe you shouldn’t be putting this information on Facebook in the first place!
The real people who should be outraged about this change is the Facebook stalkers themselves. (Actually, maybe that’s who all of these 100,000 complainers really are! The stalkers of Facebook.) This new feature takes all power away from stalkers. Stalkers gain power by having information that nobody else has because it’s difficult to find. By making all of these findable changes easily findable, stalkers don’t have any power anymore. They have no special abilities to gain knowledge beyond what “normal” Facebook users have.
When I first heard about this uproar, I was reminded of a story from school last year. One of my friends built a student blog aggregator for the school so that other students could more easily read student blogs in one place. Then, as a favor to everyone else, he took the time to add all of the student blogs he could find by searching online. But were students happy about it? No! Many students were shocked to find their “private” and “well-hidden” blog aggregated together for everyone to see. “Oh, I didn’t mean for anyone to see that post listing everyone I hate in order of loathing.” There was a public outcry for removal from this “invasive” service.
The funny thing about that story is that these blogs were already publicly visible and findable online. He wasn’t breaking any sort of privacy settings or password-protection on the posts. It turns out that people just have an unreasonable expectation of what “private” is online. If they can’t find it on the first page of Google results, then they assume that it’s locked away and safe from the world. Well, this isn’t the case. The new Facebook feature is a step toward giving this internet generation a reasonable and much-needed expectation of what “private” really means online and for that reason alone I think it’s a great idea.
The information was all there before for those who wanted to find it. Isn’t it better that you know everything they know?
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(Post Author)
UPDATE: Facebook has already added a feature that allows you to hide any of your events or actions from being included in feed services. Take THAT you whiners and complainers. Sheesh.
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I think my beef with it is that it totally removes any active attempt to see what’s going on with people. I do actually enjoy using Facebook to keep up with people I know, to see what’s going on at Olin, etc. This allows passive stalking: one button cilck and you know everything. Before, you had to know someone decently well to notice if they were suddenly single, or not single, or whatever. Now you just have to have a few bits align somewhere and poof! You know everything.
I guess it’s the same thing with blogs (though I agree those people last year were silly). I don’t *mind* if my boss googles me and finds it, but I wouldn’t hand him the URL out of the blue, or enjoy Livejournal suddenly deciding it was going to send out updates to my blog to his email every day. If someone cares enough about me to look me up, great. But I’d rather they find that information and make the decision to find it than to have someone else do it for them.
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You didn’t mention another problem with the “News Feeds” feature on Facebook: nobody cares.
The Feeds include actions your friends take with THEIR friends. Often, this is useless information. I do not need to know that my friend wrote on her friend’s wall.
This is the majority of information on my feed: actions taken by my friends that involve people I don’t know. I don’t know everyone my friends are friends with, and I don’t care to. And while I agree that this information was public to begin with, would it really kill them to give us a way to opt out of this?
Also, as of now, there are over 225,000 people in the main protest group.
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The “golden age” of facebook is over. In the beginning, it was a useful networking tool that allowed people to learn about each other. However, gradual changes have eroded what facebook once was. Rather than being a way for somebody to look up a few vital facts about a friend, its decreasing amount of buffer-zone between has caused users to question the degree of privacy it offers, once understood to be at least adequate enough to share a good deal of personal information. It will be a long time before we are totally free of facebook- even if some people leave, many will hesitate to do away with a lifestyle they’ve been leading for, in many cases, their entire college careers. The fear of being left out will prevent users from leaving, meaning we all will be stuck with a much maligned version of that which was once so essential.
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Are you telling me you and Mr. Zuckerberg know what’s best for me and I shouldn’t be able to decide whether I want my information released in news feed format to my friends? The real reason for the complaint is that we can’t customize this news feed at all. We all signed on facebook yesterday and it said “Hey, now your friends are notified every time you join a group, update info, change status, or pick your nose!” No option saying “Hey! New Feature! wanna enable it?” with such choices as “Show this information to my friends in my news feed, but not this information cuz it’s inconsequential.” The fact that it was not an “opt-in” feature is what upsets me and most other people. Sure, it might’ve taken time to catch on, but if it was deployed in a better fashion, the reaction would have been much more positive.
Also, you may think it’s funny that people don’t want information that was “already public” to be displayed in this news feed format, but you’re thinking too logically. People want a choice. People want to have to enable it, and customize settings showing what information specifically shows up in other people’s news feeds, or in their own personal news feed. The point of the *entire* uproar is this: Good idea, horrible implementation.
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I am still probing out how I feel about this. On one hand, I love when my content comes to me. RSS is amazingly convenient, and removes the “active attempt to see what’s going on”. I love when this active attempt is removed because it makes my life easier. So do the people who are providing the content: they want as many people to see it as possible.
On the other hand, my information in Facebook isn’t something that I am trying to have the largest audience possible on. It’s cool to see when my friends uploaded photos, but at the same time it’s kind of weird to see when people’s relationship statuses are changing.
The best thing that will come out of this, as you have pointed out, is that people will become acutely aware that if it’s on the nets, it’s public record. Even if it’s only there for like twelve seconds. It gets viewed, saved, cached, whatever: it’s permanent.
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I just started a group called “Students *For* The New Facebook”.
For one, as best I can tell, no one else has, which is surprising.
Secondly, I actually think, as you note here, that current facebookers just don’t see how beneficial this can be on a site like Facebook.
Of course, I was only able to invite 60 people (I’m in no way an avid facebooker), so no telling if it’ll spread.
Maybe you guys can help get the word out.
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“And if you don’t feel comfortable having some of your friends see concise updates of your Facebook changes then a) maybe you shouldn’t have friended so many random people and b) maybe you shouldn’t be putting this information on Facebook in the first place!”
I agree 150%. It really is sad that people get so pissed off because the information that they’ve already added onto a public website is now being displayed. If you don’t want the public to see it, don’t give it a place that is geared around displaying your uploaded info.
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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/Facebook_Stalker_City_Includes_LIVE_Counter
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I also did not see what the big uproar about the new feed was about. I hope that people start to realize how much information they are giving out about themselves and how public it really is.
I’m not a fan of it simply because I think it’s a useless gadget that clutters my profile (I feel the same way about most of the “enhancements” made by facebook in the past 6-9 months). I feel that it’s the sort of feature that should be an opt-in, like most of the previous changes have been. I like my profile the way I had it, and I want any changes to be made by me.
What I do like about the recent facelift is the summary of what updates your friends have made in their profiles recently.
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I think Facebook has actually done a pretty good job avoiding a cluttered appearance in profiles: you can collapse almost everything you don’t care about. That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if they soon moved to a wider layout. They could add a skinny column on the right and still have it fit on a 1024×768 screen. The modularization of content in these boxes also makes me wonder if they’ll do something like the JavaScript magic here.
One other thing I notice in the reactions to the redesign (particularly in the comments here) is a suggestion that all changes and updates to the Facebook service be disabled by default, requiring the user to opt in. This seems quite backwards to me - if you make it hard for a user to use a new feature (if you make them make a conscious decision to use it or not), nothing would ever change. For as much as people at Olin talk about change and being thrust headfirst into new experiences, the reactions I’ve seen here have been as close to Luddite as Facebook users can get. People don’t even give these changes a chance, or try using them for a week - the reaction is one of “put it back the way it was right now!”
Also, thanks for the shameless Digg whoring, Steve.
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I couldn’t have put it better myself, Sean, although I am feeling a bit of what zxo’s saying too. The improvement I would most appreciate is better filtering options for looking at the news feed, so I can choose what’s important to me.
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(Post Author)
Good points by all.
@Really?: Making the feature optional would mean (as Roland said) that 90% of people wouldn’t turn it on, making it worthless. And yes, they DO know what’s best for the site better than you because they’re motivated by millions of dollars in potential profit and have all their time to devote to just the site. User design is NEVER about doing what the users say without question. Listening to users is just the first step. I think the “X” buttons are a good step towards alleviating the worry cases that are causing most users to balk at the new feature. (”I just broke up with X but I don’t want everyone to see it yet!” Although in this case, I’m not sure why you just wouldn’t wait to put the info into Facebook in the first place. Your real friends will find out sooner than Facebook can tell them anyway…)
@Zach: Did you know that minimizing any part of a profile keeps that section minimized for ALL profiles that you view? The profile customization settings are per-user, not per-owner, which I think is a really novel idea that ends up respecting viewers way more than, say, MySpace. So, if you don’t like the mini feeds, minimize them and never see them again.
@Matt: Yeah, I agree that filtering would be nice. I don’t really want to know when a friend of mine friends any old person. (Maybe when they friend another one of MY friends.)
This suggesstion, however, is an improvement to the feeds rather than a “wah-put-everything-back-to-how-it’s-always-been” demand. The former is much more useful than the latter.