To build on what Nicole writes, and also what I think Mark touched on earlier, I think there is another issue overlaying user frustration with the Facebook changes in that there's still not enough nuance in the "friend" designation. In the past, "friends" could come to your page as often as they want and comb it for whatever sort of minutiae interests them. For your boyfriend, girlfriend or best friend, that might mean daily visits, frequent perusals of your list of friends and wall posts. But for your Chem. lab partner from last year, that might mean stopping by once a month, or right after running into you at a party. But now, everyone in your network is forced to interact with any new information you post in the same way. And you as the user have only one basic friend designation. You can give more information ("worked together" vs. "hooked up"), you can create a more limited profile to share with certain people, but you're still relatively limited in how you can designate friends. Some of my former students have been calling the changes "stalkerish," but really they're almost the inverse of that -- the newsfeeds assume that everyone in your network has the same level of interest in the details of your life that a stalker might, and foists those details upon them regardless. At the root, I think it's because online social networks are so much more of a blunt instrument when compared to the spoken and unspoken nuances of offline social networks. Amanda Amanda Lenhart Pew Internet & American Life Project alenhart@pewinternet.org -----Original Message----- From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Nicole Ellison Sent: Thursday, September 07, 2006 10:39 AM To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-l] Facebook protests Hi Nancy, I'm not sure this qualifies as "more thought out" but I think you've on to something. Yesterday my colleague Cliff Lampe and I spoke with a reporter from the Wall Street Journal (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115759058710755893.html?mod=technology_ main _promo_left) and this was a slant to the story they wrote: the fact that facebook users were upset not only about the feature itself, but also the fact that it seemed to be implemented without any feedback from users. Which seems to be the case, as this quote from the article suggests: "Ms. Deitch said Facebook's feedback from users comes in the form of emails to its customer-service email address, which the company's product-development team reviews weekly. But the company typically doesn't solicit feedback by showing features to users before launching them." Because these social network sites are built on user-supplied content, users feel more ownership over the site as a whole (compared to, say, a news portal or e-commerce site). It may be that the reaction to this change might prompt deeper, better user research on the part of these sites (which I agree is needed). Following up on the earlier conversation: My sense from speaking with students is that they dislike the feature not because it is pulling already available information, but because it is displaying profile changes that otherwise would be hard to identify. If I have 150 friends on the site, I won't typically notice when someone de-friends me. But this feature puts this info in my face, so to speak. As the old saying goes: there are some things better left unsaid. This feature is articulating information we don't necessarily want to hear. N. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Nicole Ellison, PhD Dept. of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media Michigan State University nellison@msu.edu _______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/