I’m not sure how many of you out there have ever used Facebook before, but it’s basically a much better (in my opinion) version of  MySpace for college students (and some high school students, as more schools are added).

The controversy this week has been over a new feature added that allows you to easily see what has been going on in your social network.  I’m going to take the time to argue against that here.

There have been groups formed and angry words already thrown over this feature that was just implemented about 2 days ago at most.  I for one really like it though.  It’s based on a cool web technology (RSS) and lets me see when my friends add some photos to their page, make comments, leave messages, etc.  I’m not exactly sure why this is stalking because I could get the same information if I just went to their page directly and took the time to look around and see what had changed and what had been added.  However, having several friends, I don’t have the time to do this.  I don’t know when someone gets around to finally posting pictures from their summer trip, etc.

I like this feature, I think it’s very cool and lets me keep up with what is going on with people that aren’t in my immediate “talk-on-the-phone” everyday kinda thing.  Some of these people I don’t have classes with anymore and this is about the only way that I get to stay in touch.  Any little thing to help that along is appreciated by me.

With all that said, I was going to post some pictures of what it looks like.  But then I got to thinking how long it would take me to blur out alll the names, so I’m skipping on that.  What angers me is that people argue that this is an invasion of privacy.  All the users have posted this information so that people can see it.  Only people that are labeled as your “friends” are going to be able to see the information, and it’s information that was already available, if not just a bit more obscure to see the changes.  So, long story short, I’m imagining this feature will probably be deactivated here shortly as I haven’t met anyone else that likes it and the groups online have mustered up thousands of members for destroying the new feature as soon as possible.  If you’re on facebook, be sure to search for the one group titled “I love the new mini-feed” as that’s the only one (with a riveting 53 members) that is in support of the mini-feed.  Alas, sometimes I just want to slap people instead of debate….