5/14/09 10:13 AMFacebook at 5 - Is It Growing Up Too Fast? - NYTimes.comPage 3 of 7http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/technology/internet/29face.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
Facebook’s mission, he says, is to be used by everyone in the world to share informationseamlessly. “Two hundred million in a world of six billion is tiny,” he says. “It’s a coolmilestone. It’s great that we reached that, especially in such a short amount of time. Butthere is so much more to do.” AS Facebook stampedes along, it still has to get out of its own way to soothe the injuredfeelings of users like Liz Rabban.Ms. Rabban, 40, a real estate agent and the mother of two from Livingston, N.J., joinedthe site in November 2007, quickly amassing 250 friends and spending hours on the siteeach day.But these days, she spends less time on the site and posts caustic comments aboutFacebook’s new design, which turns a majority of every user’s home page into a long“stream” of recent, often trivial, Twitter-like updates from friends.“The changes just feel very juvenile,” Ms. Rabban says. “It’s just not addressing theneeds of my generation and my peers. In my circle, everyone is pretty devastated aboutit.”Ms. Rabban is not alone. More than two and a half million dissenters have joined agroup on Facebook’s own site called “Millions Against Facebook’s New Layout andTerms of Service.” Others are lambasting the changes in their own status updates, whichare now, ironically, distributed much more visibly to all of their Facebook friends.The changes, Facebook executives say, are intended to make the act of sharing — not just information about themselves but what people are doing now — easier, faster andmore urgent. Chris Cox, 26, Facebook’s director of products and a confidant of Mr.Zuckerberg, envisions users announcing where they are going to lunch as they leave theircomputers so friends can see the updates and join them.“That is the kind of thing that is not meaningful when it is announced 40 minutes later,”he says.The simmering conflict over the design change speaks to the challenges of pleasing 200million users, many of whom feel pride of ownership because they helped to build thesite with free labor and very personal contributions.“They have a strange problem,” says S. Shyam Sundar, co-director of the Media EffectsResearch Laboratory atPennsylvania State University , of Facebook’s quandary. “This is atechnology that has inherently generated community, and it has gotten to the point where members of that community feel not only vested but empowered to challenge thecompany.”Those tensions boiled up previously, when Facebook announced the intrusive Beaconadvertising system in 2007, and again when Facebook introduced new service termsearlier this year, which appeared to give the company broad commercial control over thecontent people uploaded to the site.Facebook responded to protests over the second move by promising users a vote in how the site would be governed.But while Facebook is willing to give users a voice, it doesn’t necessarily want to listen.Users are widely opposed to terms that grant Facebook the right to license, copy and
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