Crawling Into The Fray

I know I'm going to regret saying anything, (and no offense to some of you) but....all the whining about the new facebook is kind of pointless. The point of facebook for a lot of people has ALWAYS been to be nosy about other people's lives; I know lots of people who have spent significant amounts of time each day scouring the "updated" profiles of people they are "friends" with to see what changed. I think that the "facebook" phenomenon has demonstrated nothing beyond the fact that given the chance, many people will be as nosy as they can about the lives of other people.

Complaining that the new layout "destroys privacy" and "makes it easier to stalk" is just ridiculous. I would contend that most of the reaction is from people who are now seeing, blatantly, a representation of the things they spend lots of time each day scouring around for. Maybe it's shocking, but it certainly doesn't drastically change the amount of information that some people were spending time gleaning in the first place.

(Beyond that, there IS actually a way to turn the damn things off, at least for your own actions.)

Facebook was nice for what it was on the surface - a directory, a way to keep track of networks and people. What everyone has to remember, though, is that Facebook was DESIGNED for the end client of Facebook. And I hate to disillusion all you innocents out there, but Facebook was not designed for those with Facebook pages; it was designed for the companies that BUY those pages from Facebook. I'm sure we've all read the scathing expose's in our campus newspapers by now (or the user agreement when you signed up to use Facebook, actually). Facebook, for the end user, is a way to

-observe social networks
-observe potential job candidates
-conduct advertising research
-do anything else that a person could want to do with lots of information freely volunteered by the masses...

Consider that, and Facebook's new layout as well as it's "ignorance" of people's reactions, makes perfect sense.

To Sum Up:
-Quit whining about it being "easier to stalk". Turn off your news feeds, and stop being a hypocrite about how much you were already stalking other people in the first place.
-Next Time Actually Read Your F*cking User Agreement When You Sign Up For Something As Blatantly Creepy As Facebook.