Facebook (September 27)

Pretty much everyone, I'm sure, has noticed the recent changes in facebook; the newsfeed, the refined privacy settings, the addition of notes, the opening of the network to people outside of academia. Some people are very pissed off about this; some people are cool with it; some people just don't care.

The important thing to do in this situation is to examine the original purpose of Facebook and then examine each of the recent changes from that point of view.

"When I made Facebook two years ago my goal was to help people understand what was going on in their world a little better. I wanted to create an environment where people could share whatever information they wanted, but also have control over whom they shared that information with. I think a lot of the success we've seen is because of these basic principles." - Mark Zuckerburg (http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=2208562130)

His stated purpose is to help people understand what is going on in the world. Unless you're very, very closed to things like family, old friends, graduated friends, or the outside world as a whole, "the world" consists of more than the colleges that have been added to the Facebook network. Examine the recent changes individually:

A) Notes - Allow a person to explain the otherwise inexplicable changes that they've made to their profiles. Sure, my cousin went from "In a Relationship" to "It's Complicated" to "Single" to "It's Complicated" again. If he wanted to let me or the other people watching his tumultuous love life know exactly why that happened, he would be able to if he put a note up. (Kerrigan, put a note up! You're confusin' me here, bud.)

B) Newsfeed - It ain't for stalking. It doesn't give you any information you didn't have access to before. It just makes it a little more convenient to get access to that information - if anything less stalkerish, since you don't have to go through your friends profiles seeking minute differences when they're listed as having made recent changes! And, thanks to

C) New Privacy Settings - you don't have to worry about information you don't want getting splashed all over Facebook being displayed. You can decide exactly what information you want to share, and with who, which is especially important now that

D) Facebook is Open to Everyone - After all, you don't want your parents looking at those pictures of you doing bong rips at the naked frat party you went to last weekend, do you? And you might not want your significant other seeing those flirtatious wall posts you're throwing around like confetti. Or employers seeing that your first listed interest is "Beer Funnels (Antique)".

Basically, it seems to me that Facebook is progressing is a logical manner where prior changes acknowledge the problems of forthcoming ones. Facebook is doing its perceived job, which is to provide a classier, more refined networking tool than MySpace or the various other middle-school clogged websites on the internet. Just because it "creeps you out" doesn't mean it's a bad feature.