Wednesday, September 06, 2006

I don't care if it's the same -- It's still creepy.

Seeing the reaction to Facebook's facelift is entertaining at the least. While many, including my brother and Mark Zuckerberg himself, contend that nothing essentially changed on the site -- that it's merely only making what you could already find easier to find -- I still say it ups the stalking capabilities several unwelcome notches. What's great is seeing media coverage: Time, The Wall Street Journal and Forbes, to name a few. Now old people are wondering what the crap Facebook is while undergrads and people who spend too much time on the site are up in arms that their beloved addiction is changing.

What makes the mini-feed somewhat invasive:
1. Technically, you could have seen whose wall I was posting on, if you checked every one of my friend's walls, or if we had a wall-to-wall conversation. Maybe it's just me, but I never scanned people's walls, trying to piece together conversations.
2. Before, you couldn't see what invitation I'd just turned down, or what group I just left.
3. Yes, Mark, it is just putting the information people used to go digging for out in the open, but the people who would go digging for that information probably border on stalkers.
4. Saying that someone updated new photos or changed their profile is interesting, but we don't need to know that I wrote on Justin's wall at 2:53 p.m. Wednesday.

By having a Facebook profile, we're already putting ourselves out onto the Web. So, we can't really complain. But we're still going to. We'd convinced ourselves that somehow, we still have privacy online. This is just reiterating to us that we don't. And that's just creepy.

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