Facebook Facelift makes for disgruntled users

mikeandike22 0 261 Views

If you are a user of the popular social networking site Facebook you might have noticed the recent redesign along with the new features that they added. You also might have noticed the response from the users of Facebook whom find the new site creepy. The new home page lists every little action that your friends have done on the site including things like who they added, comments they have written, changes on their profile, pictures they have added, and so on.

In my experience the whole appeal of facebook was that it wasnt as open as myspace and not everyone could just wander upon your profile and see your info. Now this completly changed and Facebook has said in their defense that all the information that is viewed in the new "Feeds" could have been viewed before. Which technically is true, but it would take some actual snopping and constant monitoring of your friends page. For example when it tells you exactly what someone wrote on someone else's "wall" that is a little overboard. I dont think everyone of your friends has to know who you talk to and when.

Overall it is a bad redesign it is very cluttered and displays too much unwanted information. I have a feeling that facebook will be changing it soon seeing as how many of their members dislike it and probably hundreds of groups have been formed now about their dislike of the facelift and some of these groups have thousands of members in them. Hopefully we seem some change soon. im not so much opposed to a redesign but it has to be a good one this did nothing except display information that I dont really want to concern myself with and the people writing it probably dont want me to either.

Dani AI

Generated

This thread captures the moment Facebook shifted from a profile-centric site to a live activity stream — the News Feed / Mini‑Feed rollout in September 2006 — and the swift backlash that followed when friends' actions were centralized into one place. Users organized groups and petitions almost immediately; coverage from the time documents the rapid protest and calls for a rollback. (TechCrunch coverage and contemporary reporting).

's reaction — that the site felt "creepier" than MySpace — hits the core issue: the update didn't necessarily expose brand‑new private data, but it changed the defaults and social expectations by making many small actions easy to discover and persistent. Aggregation reduced the friction of snooping, turning previously scattered signals into a continuous, easily browsed record. (See analysis from Wired.)

was onto the tidy timeline: Facebook did respond quickly and rolled out a privacy page with more granular controls a few days after the uproar, specifying which story types could be blocked and which items the feed would not publish. The official company announcement lists the changes and the specific story types affected. (Facebook press release.)

Practical takeaways that remain useful years later: when a platform changes defaults, review its privacy dashboard (Privacy Checkup / Activity Log), limit audiences with lists or post‑level controls, audit connected apps, and use unfollow/block options to reduce noise. For builders, treat defaults as policy: provide obvious, granular controls up front, document what is aggregated, and roll features out with clear opt‑in or staged testing. (Facebook help on privacy tools.)

Member Avatar for Stewie
Stewie 0 Light Poster

Here is an update from Mark himself
"We really messed this one up. 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. I'd like to try to correct those errors now.

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.

We made the site so that all of our members are a part of smaller networks like schools, companies or regions, so you can only see the profiles of people who are in your networks and your friends. We did this to make sure you could share information with the people you care about. This is the same reason we have built extensive privacy settings – to give you even more control over who you share your information with.

Somehow we missed this point with Feed and we didn't build in the proper privacy controls right away. This was a big mistake on our part, and I'm sorry for it. But apologizing isn't enough. I wanted to make sure we did something about it, and quickly. So we have been coding nonstop for two days to get you better privacy controls. This new privacy page will allow you to choose which types of stories go into your Mini-Feed and your friends' News Feeds, and it also lists the type of actions Facebook will never let any other person know about. If you have more comments, please send them over.

This may sound silly, but I want to thank all of you who have written in and created groups and protested. Even though I wish I hadn't made so many of you angry, I am glad we got to hear you. And I am also glad that News Feed highlighted all these groups so people could find them and share their opinions with each other as well.

About a week ago I created a group called Free Flow of Information on the Internet, because that's what I believe in – helping people share information with the people they want to share it with. I'd encourage you to check it out to learn more about what guides those of us who make Facebook. Tomorrow at 4pm est, I will be in that group with a bunch of people from Facebook, and we would love to discuss all of this with you. It would be great to see you there.

Thanks for taking the time to read this,

Mark"

Looks like they listened to everybody :)

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