Facebook is Big Brother

Just as students were beginning to pack their bags for spring break, a peculiar change was taking place. It caused some students eager to flee campus for warmer climates to pause at their computers in horror.

Clutching sunscreen bottles and swimsuits, they stared at their monitors, trying to make sense of the strange new design now certain to be a part of their everyday lives.

For those of you who spent spring break spelunking through caves with no Internet access, the layout of Facebook has changed yet again. Instead of taking hours to reflect updates on the news feed, the real-time updating home page gives users up-to-date access to what their friends are sharing on the site.

These changes seem to be inspired by (if not entirely ripped off from) from another social networking site, an online service called Twitter that offers a similar messaging feature.

According to its Web site, Twitter is “a service for friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through an exchange of quick, frequent messages. People write short updates, often called ‘tweets’ of 140 characters or fewer. These messages are posted to your profile or your blog, sent to your followers, and are searchable on Twitter search.”

While Facebook’s changes might very likely steal the college audience from Twitter, it continues to be a popular site for the baby boomer generation. Sen. John McCain has gathered considerable acclaim for his take on the micro-blogging technique, updating multiple times a day. Other famous appearances on Twitter are Karl Rove, Yoko Ono and Michael Ian Black.

Facebook has now become an immediate source of information. Status updates – which used to be a feature one had to seek out on his or her own – have become the primary aspect of the Web site.

Data about your friends is instantaneously delivered to your home page, making gossip as easily accessible as the morning news. Not only can one now check up on their friends’ latest thoughts, users have access to a photo album of their antics the weekend before and the foresight of where they might be on Saturday night.

Of course, there is protest from the community at large. The group “10,000,000 AGAINST THE NEW FACEBOOK, CHANGE IT BACK!” already has 488,003 members, and users’ statuses have continued to proclaim distaste for the change.

For all intents and purposes, Facebook has become exhibitionist. The only privacy offered by the Web site comes in the form of networks. If the user edits his or her settings, anyone outside of the person’s network can only see a limited profile.

This is safe, of course, given that no rapists, murderers, psychopaths, child molesters or thieves are a part of your completely secure “Indiana University”  network.