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Many users of university and high school social networking site Facebook.com were surprised this morning to find a whole slew of updates, including a revised layout, more AJAX-enabled forms (allowing for dynamic page editing), and, of course, the feature that has quickly become the most infamous: the personal news feed.
While most people are happy with the reorganization of certain elements, including the ability to collapse individual sections of a user's profile (if, say, for instance, you don't care about someone's "Election 2006 Issues"). This is all done entirely with AJAX, allowing the website to "remember" how you viewed a page last. Certain forms no longer require a reload to submit, and, overall, the website has adopted more of the technology commonly seen around such Web 2.0 websites.
On the other hand, the personal news feed has caused a little bit of an uproar, mainly due to potential privacy violations. Previously, users had no way of seeing other users' logs, meaning that it was impossible to track down all of a given user's wall posts and recieve up-to-the-minute updates about what groups they've joined, their relationship status, who their new friends are, etc.
Users immediately began to protest the change by creating a number of Facebook groups detailing their frustration. Many said that they found the feature to be potentially useful, but without proper privacy settings, it is too dangerous a tool, meaning that people should be able to set who can see their news feed and what they can see on it.
Other users have lodged a number of complaints, such as the "clutter" it creates in a profile, leading for a move for it to be moved to a site separate from one's profile or turned into an RSS feed. Many also feel that their main news feed on their "Home" page gets cluttered far too quickly with banal minutia of various one-time acquaintances' lives. The common counter-point to this seems to be a discouragement of what is called "friend whoring," an attempt to raise one's total friend count for no purpose other than to have a high friend count, even if that means having a number of people on one's friends list one does not particularly care about.
Nonetheless, this recent update, despite perhaps needing some adjustment and improvements, brings a whole new set of features into the expanding Facebook feature base, which may draw many more potential investors to the project.
