Anyone who uses Facebook noticed yesterday that sweeping changes were made to your pages, adding news feeds to your intro screen and min-feeds to your personal page. Largely the reaction has been negative, with petitions and groups against the news feeds popping up in and around facebook. The group "Students Against Facebook News Feed" is said to be reaching 100,000 members within a day.
Personally, I think that the new features are compelling, and worth paying more attention to. Facebook was always leading this way - moving towards being able to tell a story about your friends. When you add contacts now you have the option of describing where they fit in your life, to see everyone on a timeline; in my experience that's been somewhat underused (including by myself). The news feeds, though, bring the story to live without any work - showing comments, pictures, and connections in a whole new way. The format should be cleaner, less invasive on the several pages, more concise, but it's worth the time and energy to figure out - it makes facebook something much more than the hundreds of other social networks out there. There privacy concerns are inflated because you have no more information now than you had before, but rather it is displayed instead of requiring you to click on every friend. You still have no access to people outside of your network.
If you have a problem with the site, voice your feedback, and make sure to read the Facebook Blog to keep up on their vision.
My facebook profile, which includes a feed of this blog.
