There seems to be a good bit of opposition to the new Facebook, and it’s understandable - almost everything you do is saved and served up in the “News Feed” - and you feel like “big brother is watching” and you can’t make a move without it being known.
Consider this: that’s the way Facebook has been from day 1. Your personal information, served up on your very own profile page, for anyone that you approve to view it (you do have privacy options on Facebook - very good ones too). So, in a sense, Facebook hasn’t changed at all. Facebook, and anyone that has had access to view your profile (and the info on it) has been able to see everything that is now shown on the “News Feed”.
What has changed is the way you use Facebook. Facebook used to be somewhat of an encyclopedia, with searchable entries (profiles). You could find what you wanted, as long as you had permission to, and knew what you were looking for. Now, you still have that power, and still with the permissions limitations, it’s just that you don’t have to go looking. It used to be that when you clicked on your “My Friends” list, and you saw that so-and-so updated their profile, it might take you awhile to figure out that they added a new book to their favorite books list. Now, you don’t have to go looking - it’s served up for you, ala “News Feeds”.
I, and others that use RSS for reading news (that would include those of you subscribed to email updates from my blog), are used to this format of news - news that is pushed to you, instead of you having to go look for it. In this way, I receive hundreds of news stories and updates every day from sites I’ve subscribed to. I don’t read all of them - that would take way too much time - but I would never be able to keep up with all the sites I like to read if I had to individually visit each site everyday, on the chance that ”maybe there’s something new”. The new Facebook format isn’t so different. You are friends with people, and have therefore automatically been “subscribed”, so to speak, to updates your friends make on Facebook - governed by the privacy rules set by your friends.
Yeah, it might seem a little excessive now (even I think that wall posts don’t need to be on there), but I think with some time, these new features will be just as liked as Photos, Pulse, and the other Facebook upgrades - and with some time, Facebook will work out the kinks. I will point out though, that you can control what is shown to your friends about what you do. On your profile, in the “Mini-Feed”, each entry has an “x” to the right. If there’s something you do that you just don’t want people to know about, you can click that “x”, and it will disappear from your Mini-Feed, and it won’t show up on other people’s News Feeds.
Michael Arrington [TechCrunch] tells it like it is:
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. No one can see anything that they couldnt see yesterday. Its just being distributed more efficiently.
I also applaud Facebook for launching a product clearly designed to reduce total page views in the network by no longer forcing users to go to their friends pages for updates. That shows serious long term vision and dedication to the principle of facilitating communication among its users.
Personally, I like the new format. It allows me to see who added one of my favorite books to their list of favorite books, who joined a group that I’m in, who added new photos (and which photos are new)… in short, it allows me to easily find common ground with my friends on Facebook. “Big brother”, if he exists, has been watching from day 1. The new Facebook changes nothing about that.
Sound off in the comments.