BlackDeth: i like stalked this girl sorta 
BlackDeth: like once she asked me for a ride home from work
BlackDeth: and i took her home… i dropped her off at her house
BlackDeth: and shes like… wait a minute..how did you know where i lived?
From bash.org
I should currently be working on little abstract machines that run around finding exits to mazes in a clever fashion. However, I’ve been wanting to finish this post for a couple of days, and I should before the time to do so passes.
The title of this post is intended to elicit those familiar images of the Berkeley protest, standing up against those large corporations who would like nothing but to destroy and control our lives and how we the people of earth must take a stand against them, lest we become their mindless drones for all eternity.
These people are silly.
I’m speaking, of course, of the latest release of the site that everyone currently loves to hate: Facebook. For those of you who are not members of the Facebook, or have not logged in in quite some time, Facebook has updated its look, feel, and functionality. Among the changes is a feature called news/mini feeds that posts on one’s home page and profile page, recent changes to their profiles. This change has caused far more uproar in college communities than any Bush policy could ever hope to have, and has been greeted with fear and hatred by the iconic mob with pitchforks and torches.
Now, as a bit of a preface, I should let you know that I tend to like things that other people hate. Here is a short list: X-Men 3: The Last Stand, Clerks 2; Arnold Schwarzenegger, Capitalism, gay people, video games, Los Angeles, etc. The new facebook features now sit among this list.
I do not want to go and sing the praises of the new feature set as flawless. They clearly have their flaws or there wouldn’t be such a strong reaction to them. I’m of the opinion that these reactions are misplaced. For instance a common complaint is that the new interface is messy. Suggested solution: Drop facebook for…myspace?? Aside from the fact that myspace defaults to being fully viewable and searchable to the outside world without authentication, MySpace happens to by the largest, most bloated, broken, janky piece of software to hit the toplist of the web since the days of the reign of Netscape 4. Comparison aside, I don’t think I could possibly criticize the new UI as being messy in any way. All the blocks are independently arranged on an attractive grid layout using a now larger variety of non-harsh web-neutral colors, with important information focused and easily accessible. It’s an information aggregation wet-dream in my opinion.
If this is the case, why are so many people complaining about it? They can’t all be mistaken, as much as I’d like them to be. My guess is that it’s a very simple case of TMI (Too Much Information, for those unfamiliar with the acronym) in various forms. Not everyone wants a feed of each type that facebook has determined. Not everyone wants a feed for each person on their friends list. Even when people want feeds, they don’t necessarily want to be fed to other people (either the whole or a subset).
The problem is that facebook assumed that the privacy settings as they are would be sufficient to deal with any concerns that would arise from the new interface. However, this interface REQIRES much more granularity in the privacy settings than is currently provided. For instance, just because I want people to be able to find my relationship status profile doesn’t mean I want to everyone to be notified if I break up with Linda. What I want to make available is not necessarily the same as what I want to notify others about. Also, what if I want people to be notified about changes to my notes but not my wall? There’s no way to pick and choose what classes of data are to be fed. What if I only want to get wall feeds? What if I only want total feeds from five people? The default is basically all or none, and in the face of that people are scrambling towards none.
I do not expect facebook to retract its upgrade in any fashion, especially considering the amount of time, research, man hours, and money that probably went into designing and creating it. I was, however, surprised to see that facebook had not responded to the outcry despite the fact that I was sure they knew full well about it. This was until I remembered having seen that a facebook development blog had been started. Here’s Mark Zuckerberg’s (more likely, the Facebook marketing team’s) response. Now it seems silly to me that they would use the blog as their place for an official announcement, considering I find it highly unlikely that anyone would go there of their own accord without having been directed. That’s facebook front page material, particularly when it comes to damage control of this sort. This requires a Tom style public announcement. So the madness continues as people light their torches in fear of the unfamiliar, as Kaitlin put it so well (though I’m not sure if she had intended it the way I used it), and not entirely of their own faults.
And this is especially sad considering Simon’s observation that a great many of these changes are truly innovative.
How do we make the information people dig for on a regular basis as easy to access as possible without getting in the way? How can we broaden the functionality without stretching our development resources too thin?
The former they’ve accomplished with a great and clean looking visual style.
The latter has latched on to the response that many projects are starting to pick up on: Extensibility and Empowerment. Give the power to make facebook do what you want to the people who use it. Unfortunately the Facebook Development Platform’s reputation will probably be seriously hurt by the aftermath of the mini-feed privacy fearwave. I’ve already posted about how this is being done. This bugs me most because I had some interesting art/game projects I wanted to build from the Facebook Development Platform, which now can never have the effect I had originally intended. I’d still like to see what happens with it but it’s as if the dream was squashed before it ever had a chance.
I, in actually, think it won’t take long for facebook, feeds, and the FDP API to recover. But ignoring the privacy granularity changes I’ve suggested has the potential to cripple or bury facebook. It’s unlikely, and I don’t think it will happen, but the possibility is there.
Here’s what I think will happen:
The mob will flock to their privacy settings as instructed. Profiles will be heavily restricted. Some people will even leave facebook, though I don’t think anyone who has threatened to do so will.
The mob will realize somewhat quickly that they are no longer able to access the information that they’d normally like to access regularly because of this privacy response. Slowly but surely, people will put their privacy settings closer (but not fully back) to the state they were prior to the fear wave. The more time passes, the more they’ll want information access over privacy.
As the FDP API has more useful, more fully fleshed out and interesting applications, people will forego their fear of the “third-party” developer in exchange for the added functionality.
Facebook will thrive as ever before.
I think Facebook knows this which is why their willing to wait and not retract features. However, I would still very much like to see the privacy settings get more granular as I described. Facebook will take it as a learning experience, but if myspace can survive even when peoples accounts get hacked, robbed, and remote controlled, facebook can make a killing off this experience.
We’ll see what happens, but until then, stay calm folks. The world isn’t due to end yet. I have this on good authority from franky 
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