Facebook feeds

If you have been awake anytime in the past 6 hours, you have probably already heard about Facebook feeds. Liz over at GigaOM likes it; you can read her take in “Facebook Makes Itself Useful.”

At first glance, this seems like a positive change, at least to those with small circles of friends who like to know what their friends are up to. It makes Facebook “dynamic” and adds a live “blog” to your profile that basically tells everyone what’s up in your Facebook-life. I do think Facebook was too static before they introduced Feeds. I like the idea of my friends knowing when I comment on a photo or change my status. Then again, I am already accustomed to having my personal information available to others.

Unfortunately, the reaction to this new feature for most people is not so positive. Andrew’s comment at GigaOM sums it up rather nicely:

I’m really not sure I agree that Facebook “gets it”. The News Feed is not only a privacy concern for many, but shows mostly unimportant information. Since most people on Facebook have “friends” they don’t directly communicate with, knowing that sort of person just added a comment on someone’s wall is rather useless, and frankly an overload of information. It’s going to make people think twice about any casual social interaction on the site…

There were 600 comments on the Facebook blog within 20 minutes of the feature launches last night, every single one negative. A large number of people even said if the features weren’t taken down, they would leave Facebook. They’ve since turned commenting off on the blog.

There are a lot of issues at play here:

• Facebook is full of users who have spent the last few years friending anyone and everyone, even people they don’t know, to inflate their friends list into the hundreds. Now they have live information about hundreds of people they barely know and don’t care about. It would seem reasonable to tell these users to remove all their fake friends from their accounts if they don’t like to see information about random people they never talk to, but in the social networking sphere, the user is sometimes right. Facebook obviously overlooked this key issue about their user base.
• None of the information available in Facebook feeds is new; it is just aggregating information about what you are doing in the network. All of this information was available before. At the same time, this new feature basically raises bright red flags about everything that you do, and people certainly never respond well to bright red flags.
• There is no way to disable this information. You cannot stop your friends from seeing everything you do on your profile page and in their home page. It is basically a feature that has been forced on everyone.

What bothers me most about this new feature is that users have already started deactivating their accounts in response to it. I like Facebook because everyone I know uses it; I’m disappointed that it is no longer true. I’m very interested to see how the team at Facebook acts on this and I hope that they do the right thing (make the feature optional or remove it entirely). Until then, I have this to say to all the dissatisfied former users out there: if you are looking for a new social network to join (because you can never have enough of those), then you might want to check out Cyworld (check out my Cyworld homepage) or just sit tight and wait for FreezeCrowd.