The Highlander

On Tuesday September 5, students around the country logged onto their computers and were outraged with what they saw. "It's freaky," said a student from California Baptist University quoted in The Press Enterprise. According to The Technician via University Wire, University of North Carolina students were "overwhelmed." What is the cause of this cross the country hysteria? The culprit is Facebook's new news feed and mini-feed.

Facebook has been around since February of 2004, keeping students across the nation in contact with their friends. "[It] is a social utility that helps people better understand the world around them," writes the Facebook staff in the about section of their website. "They can create profiles to connect with friends, share interests, join groups, send messages, write notes, and post photos," the website further explains. Making contact with friends much quicker and easier than dealing with the hassle of remembering e-mail addresses, it's no wonder the site already has 9 million acclaimed members. However, thanks to new changes, those numbers may dramatically decrease.

News feed and mini-feed now allow all friends of an individual to see what that individual has written on another friend's wall, what groups they've joined, activities they will attend, changes in their profile, removal of relationship status, and what time all of this has occurred. Many students feel it is very "stalker-ish" as a college freshman put it quoted in The Technician. A notice of the changes to Facebook was posted on September 5 by Ruchi Sanghvi, the product manager for Feed. The roar of grumbling students grew so loud that it wasn't even 24 hours later and a blog was posted headlined, "Calm down. Breathe. We hear you." The author of the blog was Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, trying to calm his loyal, yet ready to jump, members. According to The Press Enterprise and CampusProgress.org, a protest group against the new features had achieved 210,000 unhappy members by Wednesday afternoon.

Despite letters, grumbles, and growing protest groups, Facebook is not removing its new features. In "An Open Letter from Mark Zuckerberg" Mark apologizes for what happened and admits, "We really messed this one up," in the opening line. However, he does thank his angered members for speaking out so they can make some changes. All though they are not removing News Feed and mini-feed, Facebook is adding privacy settings in order to hide individual's activities and information from being posted. Mark Zuckerberg "believes in free flow of information on the internet" according to his open letter, and it's even the name of a group he founded. In the eyes of Zuckerberg, keeping news feed and mini-feed could more easily help achieve that goal. What lies ahead for the Facebook staff? It's all up to the joint effort of both staff and users as Mark explains in his "Calm down-" blog, "We're going to continue to improve Facebook, and we want you to be a part of that process."

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