I'll jump on the "complain about Facebook" bandwagon
I am probably blog poster #4,000 on the subject of the new Facebook feature, but I don't really care. Stop complaining. Stop complaining. Please, I beg you. Stop complaining.
For any of you living in caves far underground with their eyes closed and their ears plugged: Facebook is a "social networking" site that lets you post personal information and photographs of yourself on the internet for others to see. Your profile can only be viewed by people you mark as "friends", people in your classes, and some other conditions I don't know because I don't really care. Recently they added a feature called the "mini-feed", which summarizes all of the recent activity on each of your friends' profiles.
Here is a sample of the offending feature (let's invade Lisa's privacy):
Okay, using this new "stalker-feed", we can see that Lisa is now friends with some guy named George, she still lives in central Connecticut, and she wrote on my wall. Now of course, this is all information that is already listed on her profile, and in order to see this feed, you needed to have access to her profile. It has saved me the effort of looking 3 lines up to see her current location, looking a couple lines down to see her friends list, and clicking on my own face to see what she wrote on my wall (I haven't checked. I'm lazy). Apparently, this is offensive to everyone on the planet because it is an invasion of their privacy and it lets creepy people see what they are up to.
Of course, that totally ignores the fact that they posted this information on the internet and added all of these 'creepy stalkers' to their friends list. All that is happening is that people are suddenly coming to the harsh realization that anything they post on the internet is *gasp* ON THE FREAKING INTERNET. Everyone is posting their personal information in a public forum and then complaining when they find out that it is actually public, and not some super-secret impenetrable spy network.
I liken this uproar to someone scribbling their number on a restroom stall, and then complaining that weird people keep calling them, while claiming, "But it was my office, only friends use that bathroom".
For the love of god, PLEASE take some freaking responsibility for your own safety and privacy. If you don't want everyone to know your phone number, don't post it on the internet. If you don't want everyone to know where you live, don't post it on the internet. If you don't want everyone to know who you are currently having casual sex with, don't post it on the damn internet. And if you actually do care about people not being able to read your (public) conversations with friends on your (public) wall, maybe you shouldn't add every single person at every single school in the entire world to your friends' list. I don't give a damn how many friends you have, and those of you with over 5,000 friends are just asking for a stalker.
For any of you living in caves far underground with their eyes closed and their ears plugged: Facebook is a "social networking" site that lets you post personal information and photographs of yourself on the internet for others to see. Your profile can only be viewed by people you mark as "friends", people in your classes, and some other conditions I don't know because I don't really care. Recently they added a feature called the "mini-feed", which summarizes all of the recent activity on each of your friends' profiles.
Here is a sample of the offending feature (let's invade Lisa's privacy):
Okay, using this new "stalker-feed", we can see that Lisa is now friends with some guy named George, she still lives in central Connecticut, and she wrote on my wall. Now of course, this is all information that is already listed on her profile, and in order to see this feed, you needed to have access to her profile. It has saved me the effort of looking 3 lines up to see her current location, looking a couple lines down to see her friends list, and clicking on my own face to see what she wrote on my wall (I haven't checked. I'm lazy). Apparently, this is offensive to everyone on the planet because it is an invasion of their privacy and it lets creepy people see what they are up to.
Of course, that totally ignores the fact that they posted this information on the internet and added all of these 'creepy stalkers' to their friends list. All that is happening is that people are suddenly coming to the harsh realization that anything they post on the internet is *gasp* ON THE FREAKING INTERNET. Everyone is posting their personal information in a public forum and then complaining when they find out that it is actually public, and not some super-secret impenetrable spy network.
I liken this uproar to someone scribbling their number on a restroom stall, and then complaining that weird people keep calling them, while claiming, "But it was my office, only friends use that bathroom".
For the love of god, PLEASE take some freaking responsibility for your own safety and privacy. If you don't want everyone to know your phone number, don't post it on the internet. If you don't want everyone to know where you live, don't post it on the internet. If you don't want everyone to know who you are currently having casual sex with, don't post it on the damn internet. And if you actually do care about people not being able to read your (public) conversations with friends on your (public) wall, maybe you shouldn't add every single person at every single school in the entire world to your friends' list. I don't give a damn how many friends you have, and those of you with over 5,000 friends are just asking for a stalker.