DU has a stalker. More accurately, DU has hundreds, perhaps thousands, of stalkers. Everyone is the perpetrator. Everyone is the victim. The weapon? Facebook.
Across the campus, students have returned for the new school year. There is the typical college noise of students settling into their new residences, classes and friends, but there is an uneasy murmur.
On Sept. 5, www.Facebook.com, the popular university social networking Web site, unveiled a new feature that now allows users to observe each other’s activity with greater ease and total anonymity.
At login, members of the free Web site can peruse through a list of current social events, called the “News Feed,” which indicates when “friends” of the user change any of their information in their profile, from writing a wall post to adding a friend to removing a relationship status.
Each event contains timestamps and hyperlinks for more thorough examinations of user profiles through the other major new feature, the “Mini-Feed,” a personalized version of the “News Feed” on every user’s profile.
Prior to the addition of the new features, users could access the same information, but with a much more tedious and time-consuming effort. This dedication to the details of other people’s profiles earned the site its nickname, “Stalkerbook,” long before the “News Feed” and “Mini-Feed” streamlined the process.
The change was met with mixed reactions from students using Facebook.
“I used to spend hours on [the site],” admitted one junior, who prefers, ironically, to remain anonymous. “Now Facebook stalks for you. It is way more efficient,” he laughed.
Many others around campus are not laughing, but cringing at that efficiency.
“I’m totally creeped,” said Jacqueline Paul, a sophomore from Albuquerque, using a term that is catching among undergrads who feel violated.
A multitude of new groups protesting the “New Facebook” appeared on the site in the days after the change. In response to the outcry of opposition, Mark Zuckerberg, creator of Facebook, issued an open letter on the site three days after the new additions, proclaiming that, “We really messed this one up.”
While still keeping the new format, he introduced new privacy settings that can limit what other users are alerted to and insisted that his goal of openly sharing information has proven successful.
Despite the recent controversy among users, Facebook continues to be the seventh most trafficked site on the Internet, according to comScore.
