Blogosphere Reacts to Facebook Feeds
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.
- Liz Gannes of Giga Om writes that “Facebook makes itself useful” in a glowing review.
- The Download Squad is pleased that Facebook has taken a stand against pageview inflation, making user convenience a top priority.
- Michael Arrington, in a review I found rather neutral, but is being spun strong positive, again writes about user convenience and usability.
- Finally, Matt Marshall of Venture Beat also finds the changes “useful.”
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.
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:
- The CyberNet Technology News reports that a Facebook group petitioning feeds has grown to over 26,000 51,000 members. (link to group)
- A website, SaveFacebook.com, seems to be materializing. Users can find out how “stop” Facebook’s feeds.
- That Site With the Name writes in an open letter to Facebook “you’re beginning to scare us”.
- Woosk.com, one of many on the meme, writes “It’s official Facebook is scary.”
- Kyoshi Martinez, in an excellent post to the TPS report, covers how the Facebook’s facelift fell flat.
- Finally, Pete Cashmore of Mashable broke A-List ranks and called it like it is in “Facebook’s Facelift - An Invasion of Privacy?“.
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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