Current location:	Waterloo
Current mood:	tired
Current music:	Goo Goo Dolls - Give A Little Bit
Entry tags:	geek, rant

Facebook Stalker
So for those of you that haven't logged into Facebook today (Tuesday) yet, it's gotten a pretty substantial overhaul. Not only is each and every section its own collapsible <DIV> section, but this whole Facebook tracking ability is interesting from a programming aspect. I know it's just a bunch of filters to see where all your activity resided, but still.

I think that their new UI addressed a couple things I didn't like before, such as when you commented on other people's photos, people weren't updated as to when those photos were commented on, save the owner of the photo. Also on the good side is updates to your profile are now highlighted for others to see. Occasionally when I go to the Friends page and I see "Updated profile in the last 15 hours" that means nothing since I don't constantly monitor people's pages. If people are worried, then Facebook should implement a cookie-based system where it highlights it with yellow background until the first time you visit their page.

On the creepy side, the wall-posts from other people on other people's walls, the added this friend, and event attendance definitely make the case. It really is nothing that invasive though. Given enough sleuthing and you can find out which friend increased their friends list and which ones stayed constant. That's if you really wanted to find out.

What I find most ironic is that this stalking that people are so afraid of is the very activity that they once did in secrecy. Now the stalking that they did on other people is blatantly in the open and they're afraid that the clandestine activities they took part in are affecting them. No one cried fowl when Friendster implemented their "Friends that viewed your profile" feature. It was sad seeing how only like 7 people viewed my profile, and probably 3 of them were by accident. *tear*

The UI's not that big a deal, but I can see Facebook caving in. They tweaked the friends from other networks back to what it was after public outcry, so I give this new UI in its current form a couple weeks at most. But really, when they implemented Notes (or really, just blogs), did you really expect them to become less pervasive in your life?