Get more articles like this and Register for our Forum.

Sometime in the wee hours of the morning, the Facebook gave itself a facelift. Over the last few weeks Facebook has been making small changes to its layout. It started when their API was opened to the public and continued with a pseudo-blog engine called “notes”. This morning’s change, however, is the biggest one to date and frankly I hate it.

The allure of the Facebook has always been in its elegance compared to the gaudy, seizure inducing whiz bang social networking sites like MySpace. This morning, Facebook users were greeted by an “Awesome” new feature called feeds. For would-be stalkers out there, these feeds are a dream come true. The old home page has now been replaced by an Orwellian summary of everything that is going on in your network.

You can see who exactly who has befriended who, all the new tagged pictures of people in compromising situations, who Susie from Intro to Accounting is dating and where that guy who sat behind you in Java Programming is going to be this Saturday, all without having to open a profile.

This would not be all bad except that traditionally there has only been the slimmest correlation between your Facebook “friends” and people you actually care about, making it much easier for basically random people to find out information about you that you might otherwise have preferred to keep private (like the address of where you are planning to be on Friday night).

It’s great that Facebook is trying to justify the $2 Billion that it values itself at, but honestly there are better ways to accomplish this than opening up Pandora’s box of privacy.

  • del.icio.us
  • Digg
  • StumbleUpon
  • Reddit
  • Fark
  • Mixx
  • Propeller
  • TwitThis