QuasiBlog Editorial

As you'll know by now, I'm quite into Facebook. It's the only social networking site I go to, it's the only one I've been interested in, and aside from this Blog, the only one I contribute to regularly. So with the furor that some recent changes have made, I give you a personal and opinionated response.

I logged onto Facebook a few days ago. It had changed. I saw new and exciting things. Things were different and I could now find out what had happened with people that I had added, and saw a catalogue of everything I had done the past few days. This gave me the opportunity to follow a direct link to a post I had made in a group the previous day to check for replies. This gave me the opportunity to look at Status changes that had been made (which I could do already, but it was on another page, and when people download things at my house, it slows the connection a lot). It basically made everything faster and more efficient.

The News feed was just as fun. It gave me the opportunity to see what had happened with people who called themselves my friends, with any events they deemed important and public enough to put onto their social networking site. This saved a lot of time too, because it is very rarely that I have the time and boredom to check each person on my friend list for changes. And a lot of the changes are trivial changes, and shockingly, I don't mind knowing if one of my friends likes a new band that I haven't heard of, because, being my friend, I value their opinion and I may well enjoy their choice of music as well. And I like knowing if a friend just went to see Severance and loved it, because it means I can talk about it with them.

One of my friends goes and puts a new movie on their list of favourite films. They found it important enough to makes changes to their profile, and they now have this profile change sent to their friends. As their friend, I can now use this information to initiate a conversation with them on the topic, and I can do it as soon as I log on, because now news is brought to me instead of me having to wait to be bored to trawl through profiles, possibly not even noticing a change like that.

I have a couple of beliefs about all the fuss created. This new feature has brought to light exactly what people share about their lives online. Suddenly people are aware of what other people can know about them, suddenly they realise what their profile contains and how eager they are to share that information. Of course, when this realisation is brought about by a change of what they're used to, the primary reaction is to blame the change. And lots of people did that.

There were so many people, such as Billy "Bill-The-Thrill" Andre, a Junior at Boston University, who insisted that the Mini-Feed and News-Feed were invasions of privacy. Can I inform you that to invade privacy, there must first be privacy to invade. Nothing on any of the feeds was at any point private, so there was nothing to invade. Instead, it made things easier for people who are interested in you to find out what you have been doing in your public social networking site.

This blog is in total public domain. There are no checks and no IP limits and no location based restrictions, anyone with a clear internet connection can read this. On this blog I put stories and events from my life that I would like people I know to read, and people who can't spend time with me to remember me by. I am aware that anyone can read this, and that it is not hard to find. Hence, while it may not seem like it, I do show some discretion in what I say. That should be true in every aspect of the internet, and is particularly true when possible employers want to find out about you.

Facebook is different. It is based around Networks which you have little control over. I believe it has popularity for this reason, that the (main) Networks have to be proved and you have to offer some kind of valid identity before you even join. So to begin with, only already with a connection with you, either on location (which is optional) or based on Educational Facility (which is not, but discretion is possible through Limited Profiles and Blocking). So already it is different from public blogs (like Blogger) and from normal social networking (like MySpace). The people who can see your profile are limited from the very start, and that isn't changing.

So the problem obviously cannot be that people you don't know and trust have more access to you through Feeds, the problem is that they have easier access. I have to ask, why is that a problem? These aren't random people. These aren't just people that happened to go to your University, or live near you. The only people who can access this feed are people that You have selected to be "friends". So the problem lies that you don't want your "friends" to see what you've been up to, you want to make your "friends" check your profile if you do anything different.

Here lies that problem, and it's the same problem that MySpace has. There are far too many people who will add just about anyone they see walking across the cafeteria as their friend in an effort to boost their numbers. They'll bolster their count in an effort to be as popular as Tom, and they ensure that the term "friend" becomes reduced to something that means nothing of the sort.

It's the Facebook Whores that now find that their public profile is just that, and it's now readily available and offered to every passing face that they added to their "friend" list. That's what they are afraid of, that is why they don't like the Feed.

Heaven forbid that the Feed could offer a very fast and efficient way of informing my actual friends of a fun group I found, or that I just saw and loved Jackie Brown, it's something that's just for stalkers to know every detail about you.

Can I ask, why do you add stalkers to your friend list?

There is a Limited Profile option that people have ignored thoroughly, and suddenly now that there is a major and apparent new change, the people who have lived their entire lives through Facebook and MySpace are up in arms about privacy.

Mark Zuckerberg announced that he has responded to the criticism, and introduced more privacy settings to Facebook. Doubtless, everyone will go and make sure that the Feeds are completely crippled as soon as they can. I won't alter my privacy settings, because I do not mind people who are on my friend list knowing what I do on Facebook. It's actually the reason I joined Facebook. To be Social. And Network.

In the group 'Minifeed is not an Invasion of Privacy', Casey Fitzpatrick, a Freshman also at Boston University, said "If you use a public restroom, should everyone else that uses public restrooms be able to know that you JUST used the public restroom, how long you used it, and what you did?". All I hope is that she doesn't add her restroom durations to her Facebook Profile. Not that it would matter, she's not my friend, I wouldn't be able to find out, even though I also sometimes use public restrooms.

I am glad there are privacy controls, but I doubt they will be used appropriately, and I am sure that the Feed that I have used and enjoyed everyday to see how my friends (people I know and care about in real life) are doing. The publicity and high profile of the protests has made it so what I do online has become slightly harder, and progress, as I have always believed in, has been reversed.