Sean-Ward.com

In some crazy turn of event, both the BGSU and Facebook pages were updated on the same day.

BGSU

The BGSU site style was updated to what is off-handedly considered the “Web2.0 design”, with it’s rounded edges, beveled images, and scrolling main page image. That image that scrolls across the background is interesting too. Many students that I heard talking about this were caught off guard, as were many departments.

It almost seems that the decision to change went like this:

“Let’s change th style sheet”.
“Ok. When?”
“Preferably after the semester starts.”
“Ok. Should we give all the departments time to update their pages?”
“Naw, they’ll figure it out.”

Seriously, it’s great when you can browse through and pages don’t match the standard style. It is nice to see that they changed how the tables were laid out. The HTML for that was ugly.

Facebook

Facebook added an interesting feature called news feed, which does not provide an RSS news feed to your Facebook page, as one used to seeing the phrase “news feed” might think. Instead, it shows on your profile page what you have done, such as adding/removing friends, joining/leaving groups, and so on. Using the news feed, people who are your friends can then see everything you have done, which gets filtered to their feed that they see when they log in.

There are two ways to look at this.

First, there is the privacy argument. A lot of students are bothered by the invasion of privacy. After all, there are 165,485 members in the group Students against Facebook News Feed. That number went up by almost 600 members in the time it took me to type the sentence. Ignoring the fact that number might be over-inflated, or that there are numerous other groups of the similar concept and counter groups, there is a lot of fuss about this. Even if you have someone listed as a friend, they’ll be able to see what you do, as well as you being able to see what they do. I believe that this is counter to part of their core principles, taken from privacy policy, which states:

1. You should have control over your personal information.
Facebook helps you share information with your friends and people around you. You choose what information you put in your profile, including contact and personal information, pictures, interests and groups you join. And you control with whom you share that information through the privacy settings on the My Privacy page.

Currently, the only way not to have items show up in your feed is to delete them as they appear. There doesn’t appear to be any other option to disable the feed once you get it going. Also, I’m not sure what would have happened if I hadn’t clicked the button to use the feed. As a result, the news feed also violates the second part of their core principles:

2. You should have access to the information others want to share.
There is an increasing amount of information available out there, and you may want to know what relates to you, your friends, and people around you. We want to help you easily get that information.

Sure, as I stead above, you can delete each item, but there is no way to stop the items from showing up in the first place.

However, the counter argument is that Facebook is a social networking site for students. It makes sense that they would show how students are connected to one another as well as allow others to see what you can do. Without the ability to turn off the feed, and the ability of others to see what you do, I feel that any argument made to support the feed is hard to make.

In an attempt to gain support for the stand against the feed, there is going to be an attempt at A Day Without Facebook. It should be interesting to see what becomes of this, especially if the students using Facebook get changes made.

It’s funny though, that the students are getting upset over issues with Facebook, but haven’t done much when it has come to politics. Hell, I didn’t even take the time to post much about the invasions of privacy the government has been at fault for doing.

Funny thing, this Internet.