When facebook.com added the features News Feed and Mini-Feed features earlier this month, members from across the country, including students at Dartmouth protested by forming groups on the website against the change.
News Feed alerts users on their facebook.com homepage the minute a member of their "friends" network updates their relationship status, leaves a group or adds another user to their friends network. Mini-Feed is an additional section on each member's profile that highlights the user's recent actions.
"News Feed and Mini-Feed are a different way of looking at the news about your friends, but they do not give out any information that wasn't already visible," said Feed product manager Ruchi Sangvhi in an introduction to the News Feed, published Sept. 5.
This explanation was not satisfactory for the users who saw News Feed as an attack on their privacy, as numerous Facebook groups were created by angry members in response to the change. At present, the facebook.com group "Students against Facebook News Feed (Official Petition to Facebook)" has over 711,000 members.
"[News Feed] put everyone's lives on display in an in your face kind of way that is just unnecessary," said Tom DeFalco '09, the founder of "Bring Back the Old Facebook" group, adding that he feels as though facebook.com runs everyone's lives. "Bring Back the Old Facebook" has over 2,000 members from a variety of schools.
Dartmouth Students are also responsible for creating a number of other groups objecting to the Feed, including "Officially Creeped Out by Facebook" and "Just Chilll, Facebook, Chilllll."
"The Facebook is obviously the most effective stalking tool. The Feed brings it to a whole new level that's a little too out in the open," Laura Pearlstein '07 said.
"And it takes the fun out of it because it used to be that you'd have to search to see what was new in your friends' profiles, but now it's just laid out for you."
In response to protests, facebook.com creator Mark Zuckerberg issued an apology soon after Feed debuted in what he said was an effort to better explain the intentions behind Feed as well as to inform users of more recent modifications to the News Feed.
"We did a bad job explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them," he wrote. Zuckerberg also introduced a new feature that allows users to dictate what type of information about themselves are available on the Feed.
The recent changes to facebook.com have caused some students to alter their usage and return to BlitzMail, which feels like a more private way to communicate with friends, Glass said.
"I used to keep [Facebook] up on my computer all the time, but now I don't really," said Ayla Glass '09, creator of "Officially Creeped Out by Facebook."
Not all students are opposed to the change, however.
"I want to see what some of my distant friends are doing, whose profiles I might not think to visit, so I think the news feed is really sweet in that way," Amy Spicer '09 said.
