Facebook changes: This time, complaints, not riots

Facebook.com is feeling some growing pains.

The site will soon be open to anyone with an e-mail address, and college students have mixed feelings.

But the sweeping change to the social-networking site, up to now used almost solely by students, isn't eliciting the same kind of outrage that Facebook users have expressed about some past alterations.

The newest round of changes will come within a month, though a specific date was not announced.

Last week, Facebook's look changed literally overnight. Two new features were added - "News Feed" and "Mini-Feed" - which enabled Facebook users to see with greater ease precisely what their friends were doing on their accounts.

When those new features were added, users created Facebook groups and petitions to protest the changes. The group "Students Against Facebook News Feed (Official Petition to Facebook)" now has 733,721 members.

By comparison, the Facebook group "Official Petition Against Opening Facebook" has 35,694 members.

But that may be because opening the site will not have as obvious an impact as News Feed and Mini-Feed, so it may take time for opposition to arise, College sophomore Ani Gevorkian said.

She sent a letter to the company protesting universal access using the suggestions page on the Web site.

But other students are less upset, saying this change doesn't have as big of an impact as the features added last week.

"It doesn't sound like the change is going to be as dramatic," College junior Eve Richer said. "It's up to you if you want to join the region or not."

Facebook users unaffiliated with schools or specific corporations will be able to join regional networks.

All of the alterations to Facebook have brought up privacy concerns for students. Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg addressed them head-on in two open letters to Facebook users.

And, according to Zuckerberg's letters, concerns that Facebook profiles will be accessible to everyone are unfounded.

"College networks will remain exclusive to people from those colleges," he wrote on the site. "Only your friends and other people in your networks can see your profile. This is what makes Facebook different, and we're not changing it."

Richer appreciated Zuckerberg's candor in alleviating some people's worries.

"He seems really concerned about keeping people's privacy," she said. "It shows he really does care about what the users think."

Gevorkian agreed that the letter from Zuckerberg helped alleviate her concerns about security, but she's still unhappy with the decision to open up Facebook to anyone with an e-mail address.

His letter "definitely made the situation a lot better," she said. "But in general I still don't think it's a good idea because the whole appeal of Facebook has been that it's a student site and exclusively a student site."

Political Science professor John DiIulio said that while students need to be concerned about their privacy and aware of any information they put on the Internet, college students are generally well informed about how to keep themselves safe because they have grown up with online access.

"You understand how permeable your boundaries are," he said.

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