Nearly two weeks after the popular social networking site Facebook.com opened membership — once limited to students — to anyone with a valid email address, Boston University students say the changes have made them look at the site in a new way.
Since Facebook’s creation in 2004 by then-Harvard University student Mark Zuckerberg, the site has rapidly expanded, first serving a handful of private universities and then opening to more schools and businesses. But despite the expansion, the site remained closed to the general public, accepting only users with official company or university email addresses and high school students invited by an existing user.
Now, any Internet user can sign up for the site as a member of one of hundreds of local networks.
Facebook spokesman and co-creator Chris Hughes said in an online press conference last month the expanded networks will be unnoticeable to those who do not want to see them.
College of Communication sophomore Stephanie Brunnemann said she was upset when she found out Facebook would open up to everyone, because it robs the site of its exclusive appeal.
“I was annoyed, because Facebook is something I looked forward to in my senior year of high school as a college thing,” she said. “Then they combined high school and college, and that was even worse. Now that it’s open to everyone, it’s gotten to the point where I can’t care anymore, because now it’s become a sort of MySpace.com and not a college website.”
While the site’s creators have experienced user backlashes when membership was opened to state and community colleges and then to high schools last year, last month’s unveiling of the “news feed” feature spurned mass protests from users, who convinced Facebook leadership to produce additional security measures.
Four days after launching the news feed, which summarizes all profile changes made by a user’s friends, Zuckerberg posted an apology on the site and announced new security features allowing users to control what information appears on their friends’ pages.
Although the site’s added security makes it possible for users to block their movements from being tracked on the news feed, CAS lecturer Bruce Hoppe, who teaches an introductory computer science course on Internet social networking and web programming, said he does not like how the Facebook default automatically shares user information on the feed, and not the other way around, where users tell the site what information they want shared.
“I think that this is a lot bigger than Facebook,” he said. “Online social networking is really what’s behind just about anything that we do on the Internet. The idea of privacy online is something where I think there’s a lot to be worked out . . . There’s no taking anything back on the Internet.”
Zuckerberg said in an online press conference he believed the news feed had been launched without proper privacy settings.
Brunnemann said she was “terrified” when the news feed was first introduced, because she felt the information it contained was “unnecessary.” However, she said she has now gotten used to the feature and no longer cares.
“Now, when I log onto Facebook, I’m sometimes so bored that I actually will read through [the feed],” she said.
Despite the uproar, Hughes said Facebook will not revert to its old ways, because the majority of feedback is positive.