Facebook’s new “feed” offering criticized

September 7, 2006 | Matt Marshall | Comments | |

facebooklogo.jpgThe latest features offered by Facebook, the popular college social networking company, have been roundly criticized.

More than 265,000 Facebook users protested, forming all kinds of groups to attack the feature within a day of its creation. The News Feed, which we wrote about Tuesday, pulls in the latest information about your friends or other contacts, notifying you for example when your secret crush breaks up and becomes available for dating again. Users complained about their activities being tracked, and for the possibility of stalking — and having the feature set as a default, instead of as an “opt-in.”

Facebook founder and chief exec, Mark Zuckerberg, responded with “Calm down. Breathe. We hear you.” But he hasn’t offered to make any changes.

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Matt Marshall is editor and CEO of VentureBeat. Follow him on Twitter at @mmarshall, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • Chris
    They better do something, as there is already talk within my group of friends about moving to another social networking site. Judging by the discussion on all the anti-feed groups, we're not the only ones.

    So far not reverting the changes seems like an ego move on Zuckerberg's part. It doesn't make sense to not give the users what they want.

    There is also a "don't support feeds by not clicking on the ads" group. I wonder how advertisers are responding to all of this. It would not seem wise to invest in Facebook at the moment.
  • Ben Baker
    But, I'm sure that for every 1 person that hates it, 10 love it. Let's see if any groups form that are in favor of it before we all get verclempt here. (Besides, who cares if your already established friends know what you're doing?) - if it's an issue, maybe those users need to trim down thier friends list to only real friends.
  • JSP
    As of this morning, Mark Z posted an open letter on facebook indicating that they have spent the past 48 hours coding privacy features for the feed/news feed feature. I hid the letter already so I couldn't past it here...maybe someone else can.