Whatever it was, clearly a raw nerve had been struck, and most agreed that Facebook had done something to further fuck with the delicate mystery woven into social networking. It was one thing to see exactly what everyone else was doing on Facebook, but if you couldn’t compulsively follow friends’ and frenemies’ lives under the cloak of anonymity, what was the point? Before abruptly deactivating the feature, Facebook released a wordy denial that, one can presume, they hoped would deflate the rumors: “The search drop-down is not a list of those that have searched for the user. It is also not a list of people whose profile the user has viewed the most or who have viewed the user’s profile the most.” Suffice to say this wasn’t exactly comforting. Those high-school era crippling bouts of insecurity are coming back with a vengeance. Thanks, Facebook!
The so-called Stalker Feature wasn’t the first Facebook tool that freaked out its users, either. The site introduced its much-protested News Feed in the fall of 2006, which documented every action that a person in one’s network took (friend acceptances, picture-album additions, Wall messages, etc.) and blasted it out so that everyone in your network saw it on their own home page. People were pissed. It was strange being alerted to the fact that your distant, remote-level friends were getting engaged and married, and then clicking through the uploaded pictures of the celebrations. Not too long ago, you’d have to attend a reunion of some kind — or have an inside connection to Ye Olde Rumor Mill — to find out details about the people you barely kept in touch with.
What generally seemed to irk people, however, was the fact that everything you did on Facebook, whether you liked it or not, would be broadcast to everyone you were “friends” with. Users organized online petitions and formed groups like “I Took a Shit and Facebook News Feed Knew About It!” In response, Zuckerberg wrote an open letter to users on the Facebook blog. “We really messed this one up,” the apology began. “Somehow we missed this point with News Feed and Mini-Feed and we didn’t build in the proper privacy controls right away.” Oops! (The News Feed is still a part of Facebook, though you can now dictate what your network does and doesn’t see.)
The pitfalls of attraction and the paralyzing aftermath of heartbreak are, quite frankly, already shitty enough in reality without being further amplified by Facebook, where the ebb and flow of guilty pleasures and relationship statuses can flip from entertaining to debilitating with every update you make.
Even given the general upset, though, I never heard anyone declare that he or she was boycotting the site for good, deleting their profile, or otherwise attempting to wipe their information off the site. Most of us stuck around and waited to see what would happen.
Sure enough, it didn’t take very long for the coding monkeys to come up with something new to torture us — er, help us connect better. Around the same time Donadio’s essay ran, Facebook launched a feature called People You May Know, created with the intent of helping first-time users find their friends more quickly. The names and pictures of three people now pop up on the side of your home page when you log in. It’s essentially a social-network crystal ball, driven by the assumption that anyone who’s one degree away from your network — a friend of a friend, say — is someone with whom you’d enjoy being virtual pals.
