Facebook's News Feed and Mini Feed Features
Facebook added two related features today, the News Feed and the Mini Feed. The News Feed is displayed on the user’s home page and aggregates all the recently information about the users friends, including wall posts, profile changes and friend additions, in reverse chronological order. The Mini Feed is exactly the same only it appears in the each persons profile and the news items are specific to that user.
This is an incredibly efficient and innovative way of displaying the piles and piles of data that Facebook has. The News Feed essentially brings the information that many people spent hours digging around for, to the user’s home page, making it incredibly easy to keep up to date with whats going on with your friends.
Many other people, however disagree with me. Confused as to why so many people hated this new feature, I did an informal poll. The general response that I got was that Facebook took the feature to far and that people aren’t comfortable with everything they do on Facebook being broadcast out to all their friends. This strikes me as rather odd.
Facebook hasn’t changed its privacy settings at all, it has simply aggregated already public information into an easy to read and access format, yet for some reason people feel like their privacy has been violated. I think that if users are putting something in their Facebook profile that they don’t want broadcast to all of their friends, then they most likely shouldn’t be putting that information into their profile in the first place.
Furthermore, (and I think many users haven’t discovered this very important bit of the puzzle yet) if you go to your profile and click the “x” next to any one the news items in your Mini Feed, it will not show up on anyone’s News Feed. Does this feature make it easier for people to get the information they once had to dig for and therefore make it easier for people to “Facebook stalk”? Yes, but it also makes it really easy for people keep up to date with what their friends, and isn’t that what Facebook is really all about?