Facebook’s introduction of a News Feed feature last week had all the hallmarks of a public relations disaster.
The feature was made public; the public didn’t like what they saw, and organized to make that known. Facebook’s first response, “Calm down. Breathe. We hear you,” didn’t stem resistance. Apologies and concessions followed.
The criticism? The News Feed, which details every action taken by a user’s friends—ranging from a dropped interest to a relationship termination—was seen by many as too much information.
“Frankly, I don’t care about all the stupid things you do,” said Rachel Schulman ’08. “It’s a lot of really stupid information to have to sift through.”
“It’s an information overload, swinging in the direction of MySpace,” said Nick Benacerraf ’08. “Facebook was always more mature, more controlled, with built-in restrictions.”
A common criticism of the new feature was that it signaled a major change in Facebook’s priorities.
“It was nice that Facebook was simple,” Schulman said. “It was good for minimizing certain awkwardness, and getting the word out about events. It seems like it’s not really about that anymore. It’s reached a weird stalking level, on par with MySpace.”
Many groups sprung up to show user distaste for the New Feed. One group, “Students Against the Facebook News Feed,” attracted over 700,000 of Facebook’s approximately eight million members.
While many media reports attempted to position the uproar as some kind of 21st century Vietnam war rally—Time magazine wondered if it had found “Gen Y’s first official revolution”—many students have turned their energies elsewhere.
“Without [the News Feed], I would not have seen and joined the best group ever, about the guy looking for a threesome,” said Joe John Sanchez III ’07, in reference to “If this group reaches 100,000 my girlfriend will have a threesome”. That group, whose creator hopes will become the largest on the website, appears to have attracted a following directly as a result of the News Feed backlash. With so many students from different schools banding together in the protest group, the potential audience for promotion of other groups has grown.
Over the last week, opposition to the News Feed has lessened. The introduction of privacy settings that limit the scope of the New Feeds has calmed some fears, although the perception that stalking is easier than ever persists.
“[Before,] you could make silly Facebook groups without having to worry about who might find out,” Schulman said. “It’s starting to feel like there’s too many tags on you. It’s like you have to cover your tracks.”
“It’s kind of creepy, and a loss of agency of Facebook members,” said Alicia Dodds ’07.
Other students were more worried about aesthetics than disclosure.
“It looks over-cluttered,” Benacerraf said.
“I feel like most people do: the layout’s atrocious and ugly,” Sanchez said. “It’s all too much.”
Many students remarked that perhaps the News Feed’s most surreal feature is reports on the ever-changing romantic relationships of users.
“My friend saw how this kid she doesn’t even really know from her high school changed his [relationship status] from in a relationship to single, and he removed ‘Joanna’ from his interests,” Schulman said. “It just seems horribly intrusive, this kid’s going through a hard time and now it’s broadcast across the whole internet.”
Sanchez agreed, noting that his own relationship with Facebook has become “complicated.”
“In general, Facebook should never be announcing when relationships are starting or stopping,” he said. “Although I guess it’s a conversation starter.”
Be it New Coke or Mel Gibson, P.R. disasters require careful, calculated responses, and the News Feed had one in Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s assurances that the site was listening to its users.
“We really messed this one up,” Zuckerberg wrote in a blog post visible to all users Friday. “When we launched News Feed and Mini-Feed we were trying to provide you with a stream of information about your social world. Instead, we did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them.”
Perhaps any publicity is good publicity, however. Sanchez saw a silver lining in the controversy.
“Looking back it’s not that big a deal,” Sanchez said. “It kind of revived [student’s] love of Facebook, logging on to see all this, the open letter and the apology. People get bored. This brought something new to the table.”
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