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Facebook users freak out, CEO responds

Facebook News FeedYesterday I reported on Facebook's new News Feed and Mini-Feed features, which allow Facebook users to see all of their friends' and groups' public activity at a glance. I praised the feature, but it turns out that a lot of actual Facebook users are having a bit of a freak-out. Okay, they're having a lot of a freak-out. Since the News Feed went live yesterday, literally hundreds of thousands of Facebook members have started and joined groups with names like "Students Against the Facebook News Feed," "Students for Facebook Privacy," "I Hate the New Facebook," and even "Ruchi Sanghvi, Creator of the news feed, is an idiot." I'm not even kidding. There are also petitions, boycotts, and other protests in the works. Apparently if you want to mobilize the youth of America, changing their Facebook is the way to do it.

Facebook is not deaf, of course, and in response Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made a post to the official Facebook blog entitled Calm down. Breathe. We hear you, saying of the features, "We think they are great products, but we know that many of you are not immediate fans, and have found them overwhelming and cluttered. Other people are concerned that non-friends can see too much about them. We are listening to all your suggestions about how to improve the product; it's brand new and still evolving." He goes on to reinforce the fact that, in terms of privacy, Facebook hasn't changed. "None of your information is visible to anyone who couldn't see it before the changes," he says, "If you turned off your wall to non-friends, no one who is not your friend will be able to see a post on your wall. Your friends can still see it; it hasn't changed. Secret groups and secret events remain secret from other people. Pokes and messages remain as private interactions. Nothing you do is being broadcast; rather, it is being shared with people who care about what you do-your friends."

Some users, however, believe that while none of their information is truly any less private, the News Feed makes "stalking" too easy. I'm on the same page as TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, however: "If this feature had been part Facebook since the beginning, their users would be screaming if Facebook tried to remove it. It's a powerful way to quickly get lots of information about people you care about, with easy settings to remove that information for privacy reasons. ... An easy fix to the problem is for Facebook to simply make each of the new products optional. Users who don't participate will quickly find that they are falling out of the attention stream, and I suspect will quickly add themselves back in." I agree on all counts. Facebook will undoubtedly lose a few users over this, but I have no doubt that those users will be far outnumbered by those who will become hopelessly addicted to the News Feed just like they're already addicted to Facebook's other features.

Now... cue the haters.
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