Facebook unhinged

So, as many people now know, Facebook recently added a feed feature. This aggregates all changes that would have been visible to you, and puts them in one place. Unfortunately for Facebook, this has made many people upset. Several people have left Facebook and many more are threatening to do so, and large groups (some 10,000 strong) have been formed to protest this feature.

I am not one of those people.

Many people upset with the Facebook feeds were simply unaware that anyone who gets those feeds was previously able to see all the changes listed in the feeds. It is actually much worse then that, of course; in fact, most people who go to the same college as you can see those changes, but the feeds are only for your friends.

Others object that, while the information was previously available, it was so easy to obtain. This is a valid point. However, the abuse scenarios (e.g. one of your friends stalking you) do not come into play. Those people who were already interested in your life were already checking your profile often. They would have already seen any changes you made.

Still others object that you don't want everyone seeing every change you make to Facebook. For instance, you may be friends with a sibling, but not want him/her to be able to see all those raucous photos of you at that party last night. I think this is a symptom of the "unaware that anyone who gets these feeds was previously able to see all changes listed in the feeds" syndrome.

So it appears I'm in the minority in liking these changes. The people who say Facebook did this because they don't care about their users are idiots, by the way. Facebook, as any other social networking site, makes money off advertisements. This feed thing is a really bad deal from an ad-impression standpoint, because people will only log in, check one page, and maybe publish a status update, rather then browsing to all their friend's profiles. I think the Facebook people thought, just as I think, that this would be a really cool feature.

Regardless, I have an acceptable solution to these problems. Sites like Myspace and Orkut have allowed you to rate your closeness to a friend for a long time now. Facebook has something similar in "how do I know this friend?" Facebook simply needs to allow/disallow viewing of events from your feed based on one of these two options. You could even customize a particular change; by default, it may be "friends at my college", but you could change it to "family", "high school buddies", "everyone", or anything else you can think of. This could even replace the groups interface for real world organizations, who tend to get lost in the muck of all the fan groups anyway (e.g. change the feed to "any member of my organization VandyCS").

In the meantime, I think this has served as a valuable lesson to all those people out there who thought Facebook was private. It can be, but for you, it probably isn't. It takes *literally* five clicks (login, My Privacy, Edit Settings (under primary network), Only Your Friends, Save) to restrict your information to only your friends. It only takes a couple more to turn off those embarassing photos and wall posts, or restrict those to only your friends. While I leave my profile more open (who would hate me?), if you do embarassing things on Facebook, you should take these steps.

That is all.