myface?

IU senior Jesse Masur has two crucial, simple uses for Facebook: damage control and late-night memory recovery.\n"I check it about once a day, but usually it's just to see if I need to delete inappropriate comments from my wall," he said. "Also, I can piece together long nights out with other peoples' tagged photos of myself."\nOther than that, Masur doesn't use the popular networking site often. But now that Facebook will open its network to anyone within a month -- even to people not affiliated with a company, college or high school -- Masur and others are considering whether they still want to use the once-exclusive system at all.\n"If Facebook is open to the public, I don't know if I'll keep using it," he said. "Do we really want our parents to know about those Friday night beer bongs?"\nAccording to a Sept. 11 article from Forbes online, the site is ready to adopt an open-admissions policy, allowing anyone to join, regardless of affiliation.\nThe admissions policy, which enables anyone with a valid e-mail address to join Facebook, would require new users to register under one of 500 regional networks that would operate in the same way current school- and company-based networks do. All current privacy settings would apply to new users.\nLast week, Facebook launched its news feed system, which updates users about changes in information from friends' profiles once they log on. That addition sparked widespread protest from members who didn't like such information displayed so prominently.\nFacebook management responded with little action at first but quickly coded new privacy controls into the system and announced the new features with an apology from its creator, Mark Zuckerberg.\nSimilar backlash, in reaction to the new admissions policy, might already be taking shape.\nBrad Ward, who graduated from the University of Illinois at Springfield last spring, started an anti-open admissions group Tuesday. By Wednesday evening, it had more than 4,000 members. \n"I first read about the changes at Digg.com, (a popular user-content publishing site), and I saw that this was on the way to being implemented," Ward said. "I wanted to get out in front of the issue."\nWard didn't really mind the news feed and mini-feed changes and said he laughed at all of the groups protesting the new features.\nBut the imminent opening of Facebook's network to virtually anyone, Ward said, threatens to become far more of a problem.\n"I'm worried that it's becoming MySpace," Ward said. "Even though you have to add people on Facebook, most people add whoever approaches them, so with an open environment that could really present some problems (with privacy)."\nWard was concerned that the similarities to MySpace might not just be bad for users, but bad for Facebook in general.\n"I understand they need to do this for financial reasons, that it's about money," he said. "But if it becomes like MySpace, what's the point? Will I have to read some kid's crappy html and bad emo music on the Facebook, too?\n"In a way, I kind of feel betrayed. I think Facebook owes its users some sort of consideration on these changes."\nWhile attempts by the IDS to contact Facebook headquarters were unsuccessful by press time, a company spokeswoman told Advertising Age that Facebook understood they needed to do a better job "keeping their community informed."\nFor Masur, beyond his normal purposes, Facebook has lost its luster.\n"I think it's time that everyone just faced it: Facebook is well past its prime," he said. "What made the Web site so appealing in the first place was that it was made exclusively for college kids. It's a joke now -- except for the ability to write embarrassing stories on other peoples' walls." \nSee Campus for what IU students think of Facebook's decision to go public.