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Facebook Digging Themselves a Huge Hole?
By Drew Meyers | September 6, 2006
As many of you know, Facebook announced a couple new features yesterday. Quoting their blog-
You’ve probably noticed that Facebook looks different today. We’ve added two cool features: News Feed, which appears on your homepage, and Mini-Feed, which appears in each person’s profile.
A facebook group called “Students against Facebook News Feed (Official Petition to Facebook)” was formed to petition facebook to rid itself of the new features. If you’re interested in the description of the group, here it is:
You went a bit too far this time, facebook. Very few of us want everyone automatically knowing what we update. We want to feel just a LITTLE bit of privacy, even if it is facebook. News Feed is just too creepy, too stalker-esque, and a feature that has to go.
We demand that either the feature goes, or that we have an option to remove ourselves from the feature. Nothing people write on our walls, or what we write, or what we update goes up on the “News Feed.” These are small demands of your users, but we are here to complain and protect our privacy.
I know it’s odd to protest facebook through facebook, but this perhaps is the best way for them to get the message.
Until this feature is removed or changed to protect my privacy, I WILL NOT update my profile, and I hope you will too.
So join here, and you’re part of the petition to remove the most undelightful feature to have ever hit facebook.
The uproar over the invasion of privacy is amazing. The official group that is petitioning facebook to get rid of these new features has over 400,000 members and over 21,000 wall posts on the group page. I left my office at about 5:45 today, at which time the group had 390,000 members and 19,000 wall posts. By the time I got home around 6:15, there were 410,000 members and 21,000 wall posts. The beauty of social networks is their ability to spread the word. Where else could you get 20,000 members to join a group within 30 minutes?
Of course, the blogosphere has picked up the story as well. One blog even has a live counter (now over 430,000) of the number of users in the group.
Will this turn out to be a deadly mistake on the part of Facebook? They need to address this ASAP or risk losing many of their users. Lesson- do not blindside your users with features involving privacy! I think this feature could have worked had they eased their users into it and not had it take over their front page.
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September 6th, 2006 at 7:18 pm
[...] Drew Meyers is reporting that in just 30 minutes tonight that more than 20,000 people joined the protest page. [...]
September 6th, 2006 at 8:31 pm
wow, nice blog dude!
September 6th, 2006 at 8:48 pm
Thanks Arjun. Are you going to start your own blog??
September 7th, 2006 at 7:06 pm
[...] WOW…talk about timing on this news. I’m sure Salesforce didn’t time this with the Facebook fiasco (or did they?), but the news that they now have a Winter 07 preview section of their web site is another great business move by salesforce showing that they are listening to their users. What are they doing? There are previews of all the new features that salesforce may roll out this winter that users can vote on. This shows they are very serious about giving their customers what they want. If you are a web 2.0 company (or any company in general), make sure you make your product decisions with the help of your customer. It looks like they are investing in a desktop calendar and are looking for customer feedback. I’ve used salesforce personally, and I can see the future possibility of organizing your whole job in salesforce if they keep adding features to their already rich feature-set. In addition, they have lots of logos to vote on for Winter 07, the most popular being the image below. [...]
September 11th, 2006 at 11:39 pm
[...] I know, a bit of Facebook overkill recently, but what can you do when a company keeps putting out news? The most recent news? Facebook is going to open up their registration to anyone and everyone by adding 500 geographic regions for people to associate themselves with. No longer will people be required to have a .edu domain name (and more recently- one of about a thousand corporate e-mail domains facebook added). Facebook’s exclusivity was a big reason that it proved so popular with many of its loyal users. The main reason I don’t like Myspace is that it is littered with spam. Business Week reported on this news that Techcrunch and Mashable both mentioned earlier today. [...]
September 28th, 2006 at 9:14 pm
[...] I guess the news from Facebook just keeps on coming. The latest? They are going insert viral advertisements in those “newsfeeds” that caused such a riot. One thing that probably would have caused an uproar was that, “When one user clicks on an advertisement in their feeds, all of that user’s friends will be notified that the ad was clicked on and will be given an opportunity to join a group led by the advertiser”. However, Techcrunch just posted an update (below)- Update: Melanie Deitch, Facebook’s Director of Marketing, emailed to tell us that the MediaWeek story we linked to below was incorrect and that in fact, no unsolicited notices will be sent. Only users who have elected to join a sponsored group will be notified when friends in that group click one of the group’s ads. That’s good. [...]
November 7th, 2006 at 12:26 am
[...] In my opinion, user control is essential to any online community and Facebook has built one of the most engaged communities on the web due to emphasizing this issue (yes- they have made mistakes along the way). [...]
February 8th, 2007 at 3:03 pm
Nice..nice post.