Facebook announced radical changes to its social networking platform Thursday that seem likely to intensify the role it plays in people's lives and intensify privacy concerns. Not surprisingly, the changes have annoyed many Facebook users while pleasing a lot of others.
In a nutshell, Facebook is angling to chronicle much more about people's lives than the simple status updates, photo uploads and "like" buttons have allowed it to do so far. Facebook plans to do so in part through a bunch of automatic sharing apps that will let people share what they're doing without having to actively post about it.
Among the big changes:
- New apps -- Facebook is opening its software platform to new types of apps designed to let people have more of their everyday activities posted to or recorded by Facebook. These new apps will be varied, but the early ones Facebook showcased include music-sharing partnerships with services like Spotify to let people automatically update their Facebook friends on each song they're listening to. Friends can click to listen in real time with them to the same music, offering a new kind of sharing on Facebook.
- Timeline -- At the end of this week, Facebook plans to roll out a revamped profile to everyone. Called Timeline, it offers a visual view of your Facebook activities over time, ordered chronologically. The idea is to let you (and your friends) visually scroll back in time and review your life on Facebook. Even though most of this information already has been viewable by your friends, some privacy hackles are going up at how much easier it's going to be to scroll back through people' lives. Some folks worry that this might take Facebook "stalking" to new levels.
- Ticker -- Facebook rolled out an all-new feed of real-time info about your friends' activities and displays it in a vertically moving ticker in the right sidebar. The ticker is designed to showcase less important or significant activity that might not make your news feed, for example. Unlike the news feed, which often has lags in time for posts, the ticker is designed to show what's happening in real time. That scrolling action has annoyed a lot of users, though.
- News Feed/Most Recent: The stream of updates you see now combines into a single "News Feed" view what used to be separated into two separate streams labeled "Top News" and "Most Recent." Facebook announced the change in its blog. It annoyed a lot of people who object to having the cherry-picked "Top News" displayed prominently at the top, while they are no longer being able to switch to the purely chronological view that "Most Recent" used to represent. Facebook offers a description of the new news feed.
Here's what some reviewers are saying about the changes:
- The Los Angeles Times interviewed developers who contended that Facebook's changes will move the service beyond social networking and make it more of a social operating system for people's lives.
- Forbes said the changes are making Facebook "the social infrastructure of the Internet."
- Gizmodo called the new Facebook Timeline "a visual history of your existence" and described it as "beautiful." Hailing it as "the single greatest change that Facebook's every pushed on us...," Gizmodo gushed that is "invaluably illuminating testament to what humans are making themselves every day."
- In a Mashable op-ed, Barry Parr said Facebook's changes were putting a sword through the heart of privacy. He noted that the new class of Facebook apps are designed to automatically post a lot more about people as they use the apps, rather than requiring them to actively choose to post as they do when the write a status update or click "like." Calling this "passive sharing," Parr writes, "Facebook's passive sharing will change how we live our lives. More and more, the things we do in real life will end up as Facebook posts."
HATE the fb changes. The arrogance of them deciding what is important is outrageous! ! The invasion of privacy is a sad commentary on our society if people put up with it. I have been trying to find a way around the mechanism for posts to be brought to top. you can unmark by hovering on top right, a box displays that indicates they will try not to put that type story up top, but they lie. One thing they have forgotten, and perhaps we have as well. That is that we can all live happy, productive lives without FB!
ReplyDeleteSeptember 29, 2011 at 2:02 am
(2) Linda says :
I still think FB, new or old, makes for a manufactured life: sweet and tasty, little substance or nutrition, easy to overindulge, and addictive.
Online social networking gives a semblance of “friends” with none of the depth of true friendship; hence the people with hundreds of “friends” but still a hunger for someone, anyone, who understands them.
The oversharing so common on these sites is another symptom of the lack of depth of open and honest friendships. There is no room for soul-searching when -everything- is out there, so only the surface is skimmed and sifted.
Privacy, -not- being stripped naked, is a human need, oft discarded in the search for honesty and openness without regard for the social ramifications of doing so.
… I think I’m venting… My apologies if I offend…
September 29, 2011 at 2:14 am
(3) Jennifer Susan says :
I do not like the changes Face Book has made. I want my some of my life kept private. When I play any games on Face Book then all of my friends know about it because it’s posted on all your friends Face Book games page. I want some of the things such as when I’m playing games kept private from my friends also. There’s others changes that Face Book has made that I dislike. I will more than likely go to google+ when Face Book makes more changes. Many of my friends are already going to google+ and want me to follow. I will either do that or just forget them both.
September 29, 2011 at 6:59 am
(4) Transcription Company says :
Facebook’s new feed changes went global. I like the changes which are done in facebook, people got updated with everyday news and frequent visitors will see an option to expand recent posts at the top of the page. Top stories are marked with a little blue triangle in the top-left corner of each post. Get over it. Life is about change.