Blogosphere Reacts to Facebook Feeds
Posted 9/05/2006 10:32:00 PM |


Its been an interesting day watching reaction to the new Facebook "feeds" percolate through the blogosphere. Here's a selection of some of the posts I found interesting, with commentary.

First, posts with a positive review.
Echo chamber much? Granted, one can't expect A-list bloggers to completely understand the ecosystem of something like Facebook, but the long-tail blogosphere clearly doesn't share their collective opinion.

Scott Kidder writes:

Mike [Arrington, of Techcrunch] and Liz [Gannes, of Giga OM]: have you ever used Facebook? Not tried it out, but seriously used Facebook, day after day? This is not cool. It's one thing to stay up-to-date by seeing a friend has updated their profile. It's quite another to be able to view the history of their relationship status, and see exactly who and when they make new friends.

The blogosphere replies with a collective Amen.

Onto some of the less positive reactions:
Of course, this is just a small sampling of what has been written today. Unfortunately, the major blog search engines don't have temporal searching (so I can't really pull out stats), but perusing recent posts about facebook feeds shows them almost lock-step highly skeptical on the feature.

I'm blown away by a few things. First, the reaction of the blogosphere has shown me, again, the power of the long tail. The A-Listers are out of touch, spouting about technology they don't understand or use heavily. The best posts I read on the subject, far and away, were from folks who didn't have any "authority" in Technorati. I hope people from the Facebook also read these posts - they are truly a splash of cold water to the face.

I'm blown away by how strongly and negatively people reacted to the feature. As a pretty huge privacy-phobe, even I didn't think this feature was that "bad". With the press' recent obsession with Myspace, it only stands that students are more attuned to privacy and disclosure issues - and the completeness of disclosure in Facebook feeds seems to have stunned many.

Finally, I'm blown away by the sheer level of emotional investment the community has in Facebook. Well, actually, I'm not, but I do feel that a day like today really validates my research. When social software is adopted by the community, that software begins to have a responsibility in (and to) the community. That software must play by the rules of the community, and it must not deviate too strongly from the norms of the community. A generation of college students are socialized on the Facebook, and today Facebook went and changed everything. Imagine going in to your favorite local coffeeshop and finding out they no longer serve lattes, because it is user friendly and efficient to only serve brewed coffee. If you're a fan of lattes, wouldn't you have wished they'd asked your opinion first? Facebook's users feel like that today, except we're not talking about lattes, we're talking about their identity.

As someone who watches the Facebook closely, this has been a fascinating day. Earlier today, I wrote "This morning, millions of college students are thinking differently about their online identity." I'm starting to believe that just might be true.


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 At September 06, 2006 9:58 AM, Anonymous jkd said...

Not just the blogosphere! Our own Daily Tar Heel chimes in this morning with a scathing editorial against the changes:

"The "News Feed" and "Mini Feed" features... will help busy campus stalkers get more information about their unknowing crush victims.
...
[There is] aan unexpected loss of privacy that comes from seeing your old wall posts dragged back up and linked from the middle of your profile.
...
If you're on Facebook - and there's no sane reason not to be, if for no other reason than it keeps you from looking socially aloof - think about what you put up.
...
The best way to use Facebook is to assume that anything you ever put up or post - even if you delete it later - will appear in some political attack ad or office e-mail 20 years down the road."

Just a guess - this is probably not the only college newspaper editorial along these lines today (or later this week for those with weeklies rather than dailies). Even in stodgy old print - when it's on college campuses, at any rate - this is a big story.

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