I'm not sure I've ever seen quite as much backlash about anything on the Internet as there is over the new Facebook features. There's a petition (on Facebook) with 50,000+ signatures to change it back...they talk about the outrage....and here...and them...it's seriously on just about every tech related blog on the Internet. The founder of Facebook even wrote about the outrage and asked everyone to calm down. The Internet is going crazy!

I, for one, really like the upgrades to Facebook. I don't spend a lot of time on the site like some people, but when I do log on I would check to see who has updated their profile only to most of the time have absolutely no idea what they actually changed about it, and I'm not going to sit there and read line by line looking for changes. This new 'feed' feature obviously solves that. I think these new features put Facebook even farther ahead of MySpace in terms of being a social networking site. MySpace gets most of the buzz and is the talk of just about everyone, but I hate it; first of all it's gotta be the ugliest major site on the Internet, it's usually a disaster to go to when everyone has some kind of loud music playing when you load their page or some flash animation that brings the site down to a crawl, and lately it seems to have a lot less to do with social networking and a lot more to do with band, television show, and movie marketing. I get at least a few emails a week of "friend requests" that are from new bands just trying to spread their music or girls someway involved in Internet sex sites. These aren't called friend requests, these are called SPAM, and MySpace is filled to the brim with it now. I have yet to get a single "spam request" on Facebook and I would be very surprised to since you need a school or work email address to sign up for it. On MySpace anyone can sign up, hence the recent outbreak of alleged pedophiles on MySpace.

Also lost in all this Facebook backlash is another cool feature they released called Facebook Election...the feature encourages users (obviously most of which are young adults) to get involved in the upcoming elections by learning about and backing candidates as well as issues. This is a great idea and at the very least encourages discussion about political issues with a demographic usually lackluster about such things.

I would not be at all surprised to see Facebook give in to user demands and scale back a lot of these new features, but I hope they don't. My guess is that they will make it either the default or easier to hide your information in these new features. I'm not entirely sure why everyone is so mad, it's not like all this information wasn't out there before on the site, it is now just much easier to sort through. If you don't want someone to know something about you, don't post it on your profile....or change your profile settings to restrict what other users can see...it's easy to do. From a technology standpoint these are cool features that make it easier to keep up with your friends' lives...Facebook is not MySpace, imagine if these features were on MySpace, then there would be SERIOUS discussion about these 'feeds' being stalker tools.