DT: New Facebook just caters to our use of site

I’ve decided to start posting some short comments on articles in the Daily Trojan, USC’s student newspaper. This particular article is interesting because it tries to advocate the view that people should stop worrying about Facebook’s changes. Here’s one sentence that makes me sick:

To those people, I ask whether they are really being honest, because who hasn’t gone on someone’s profile to check his or her interests, relationship status or pictures. [sic]

Where are the copy editors? This is a punctuated newspaper, not a blog. Shouldn’t they be using proper grammar?

There’s a bit of a factual problem:

To go along with the News Feed, many are also furious over other people’s ability to see whose wall they’ve posted on, whom they friended and what events they plan to attend. Some people consider that information “too much.” […] If students are gratuitously distributing their phone numbers, home addresses and screen names and are posting drunken pictures of themselves on this Web site, how much could a little more information hurt?

I would argue that a “little” more information could definitely hurt, depending on what the information is. But the problem is that there is actually no more information provided that you didn’t have before. Walls have always been public. You could always have seen what people have posted. Who your friends are has always been public information, too. Same for events. Facebook has always shown who is going, who isn’t, and who hasn’t responded. For every single example cited by the DT article, there is no more information being revealed now than was already revealed before. The only difference is that Facebook has made that information easier to find and better organized.

In my opinion, that is definitely a good thing. It’s better that you have information out there and know about it. In the past, you had that information out there, but you weren’t aware of it. Bottom line: there’s exactly the same amount of information as before. Those who imply that there is now a “little more” are simply wrong.