For someone who doesn't have a Facebook account, I've sure been Facebook-obsessed this week. I've been on the edge of my seat watiting to find out what changes, if any, Facebook's developers would make after many users freaked out about their new News Feed and Mini-Feed features. All told, the largest anti-News-Feed group gained more than 700,000 members in about three days, almost 10 percent of Facebook's entire membership, and numbers like that can't be ignored. Today Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a blog post announcing changes that give users more control over what information their friends will see in the News Feed and Mini-Feed. The blog post is almost comically humble, beginning with, "We really messed this one up." He goes on to say, "Somehow we missed this point with Feed and we didn't build in the proper privacy controls right away. This was a big mistake on our part, and I'm sorry for it. But apologizing isn't enough. I wanted to make sure we did something about it, and quickly. So we have been coding nonstop for two days to get you better privacy controls. This new privacy page will allow you to choose which types of stories go into your Mini-Feed and your friends' News Feeds, and it also lists the type of actions Facebook will never let any other person know about." He also thanks all of the vocal users and points out, somewhat indirectly, that it was the News Feed itself that enabled millions of users to find those anti-News-Feed groups in the first place.

I'm glad that this is the route Facebook took. The Feed is ultimately a very useful tool and really sets the site apart from MySpace by putting the emphasis on the user and not pageviews. This granular control of what information is shown in the Feed probably should have been included from the beginning, but Facebook's experience will serve as a learning tool for it and many web sites to come. Hopefully.

That famous and cutting edge blogging company SixApart, responsible for TypePad, Moveable Type, Vox, and LiveJournal today announces that it will gobble up social news aggregator Rojo along with Rojo's Nooz. According to TechCrunch, SixApart is planning to "sell a majority interest in the services business within a few months" (Barak Berkowitz, SixApart.com). We're guessing that means part of Rojo at this point. SixApart will continue to dash into the enterprise blogging fray, while Rojo remains a separate entity (for now) sans their leadership who will join SixApart. What will this mean for SixApart, and what about Rojo? Is this good for both? What do users of either service think? This will no doubt lead to greater integration in some way, but how? Sure, I have my own ideas, but after all 18 heads are better than one. Anyone care to speculate?

Yesterday 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.

Last night social networking heavy hitter Facebook got a significant update in the form of the News Feed. The News Feed is a sort of dashboard that consolidates all of the recent updates relevant to you, e.g. your friends' profile changes, new members of your groups, new events, photos, and so on. Though I'm disappointed that there's no actual feed in the RSS/Atom sense, I am pretty impressed with the interface. Each category has a unique icon, e.g. a heart (or broken heart) for relationship status changes, a calendar icon for events, a flag for political issues, and so on. It also puts the full text of wall posts and thumbnails of photos right there in the feed. In addition to the News Feed, every user's profile now features a Mini-Feed which shows all of their recent activity.

The News Feed basically condenses all the day-to-day information that Facebook power-users would have spent a lot of time clicking around for into a single page, which is essentially the opposite of what MySpace does. MySpace takes advantage of poor design and endless clicks to maximize pageviews at the expense of usability. Facebook seems to have taken a stand against that sort of pageview inflation and made user convenience its first priority. Sorry for hating on MySpace, but it's really refreshing to see someone else do it right.

How many times have you emailed the "webmaster" at a site, only to never hear back? Most companies have a generic webmaster address (if they bother to list it), but that address may never see the real webmaster's inbox. Worse, said webmaster might not care that his pages aren't compatible with Opera... Still more common is when a doofus like me can't figure something out, emails the webmaster, and gets either a form letter or nothing in response. Well I just wanted to thank O'Reilly for apparently taking an interest in its users. See, I'd been missing Meerkat, O'Reilly's newsfeed, which was an aggregated feed of some great sites out there. They quit "broadcasting" Meerkat's feed last month. Luckily, they put the OPML file up, sort of, for mass consumption (the link opens a page of the XML, which you copy/paste into Notepad, then save as OPML). But something in the file prevented RSSOwl from using it. So I hit up Justin, the webmaster, using the email provided right there on the page. And guess what? A couple of email exchanges later, and Justin had fixed the OPML file so that it works in RSSOwl. Wow. That, folks, is customer service. Big shout out to Justin and the rest of the team at O'Reilly for doing a great job and actually caring about the user experience. Wish we saw more of that in the technosphere...