Facebook’s New Feature sigh

I’m really starting to dislike this site stemming from the recent snarky remarks made by founder Mark Zuckerberg. It’s difficult to bitch about a site that has provided, for a short while, a safe and private way to reconnect with people I haven’t seen in 20+ years and I did quite a bit of pulling to get people I know to join up and leave their old social network behind, so I’m torn.

Here’s the situation where I feel that a lot is being unsaid and I think that the jump in people joining the site perhaps made it difficult to maintain the growth and keep the initial integrity of the site that once offered us a safe haven to interact without be stalked and spammed by strangers.

“Addressing a gathering at the ‘Crunchies’ awards in San Francisco on Friday, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, 25, said that in the ever-growing social networking online scenario, the expectation of privacy no longer remains a “social norm.”

Speaking with reference to the last-month-introduced Facebook’s privacy settings’ change – that evidently encouraged the social network’s users to set all their personal information to public, Zuckerberg hinted that the social norms have evolved to a ‘buck naked’ state in the present times.

Zuckerberg elaborated his opinion saying that people not only starting showing much greater ease in terms of sharing more information of different kinds, but have also become more open with more people.

Justifying the changes made to the privacy settings of Facebook users, Zuckerberg said that for companies like Facebook, it is important that the changing social norms are aptly reflected, so as to retain their relevance as well as competitive edge.

Zuckerberg said that not many sites would have the courage to undertake the task of a privacy change for 350 million, and most of them would remain “trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they’ve built.”

Zuckerberg added that for Facebook it was a really important thing “to always keep a beginner’s mind.” About the need to change privacy settings, he said: “We decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.”

Enough about that though– here’s the nifty new feature that is aimed to shut us up about leaving FB behind for more primal means of social networking (like using phones, e-mail, texts, messenger and um– visits to those who are local).

You can now update your status and respond to comments made to a status via your e-mail, which does help the FB addicts whose work blocks the site.

Yay. Awesome.

“One of the easiest ways to stay updated on relevant conversations happening on Facebook is through email notifications, which inform you about comments made on the posts you’ve created or commented on. These notifications—for comments on such content as status updates, photos, videos and Wall posts—allow you to stay informed about your Facebook friends’ activities without being logged in when you’re on the go, on your phone or at work.

Today, we’re launching the ability for you to participate in these conversations by replying directly to these email notifications. When you receive an email notification about comments, you can just click “Reply” and start typing a comment at the top of the email. Then hit “Send” from your email and your reply will automatically be added as a comment on Facebook without you having to even log in.”

It’s difficult to bitch over something that is a service provided to you for free, but I get the feeling they know this and are starting to test the waters of what they can and cannot do with our information.

For all you social networking addicts out there- Yay, e-mail updates and responses. Party on.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 at 6:36 pm and is filed under Recent, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.