Facebook Members Forced To Face New Changes
Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, a leading online social network, will begin forcing its users to make an adjustment that they might not be inclined to make.
If there’s anything 24-year-old Zuckerberg has learned over the past 4 years of Facebook’s evolution it’s that even the site’s most loyal users are usually opposed to new cosmetic and functional changes to the site.
In an attempt to learn from previous changes, Zuckerberg chose to take a different approach to the most recent site update: allowing users to opt out of using the site’s new interface. However, as of Wednesday, users who chose to stick to the status quo will be forced to switch over to the newly designed online hangout by the end of the week.
"Any change can be a big deal to our users because this is how they connect with their family and friends," said Zuckerberg, a Harvard dropout who was named the youngest billionaire on Earth by Forbes Magazine. "So when you move things around, it can be perceived as being not a positive thing even when it’s a positive change."
About 40 million users already have checked out the new design and about 30 million liked what they saw and chose not to revert to the old look, Zuckerberg said.
But some groups have began to mount in their opposition by posting petitions on Facebook to protest the change.
"It’s not that we don’t want change, period, it’s that we don’t like these particular changes," said Scott Sanders, 19, an Austin Peay University student who started one of the petitions opposing the redesign. "You have to navigate more and you have to click more to get to personal profiles. It’s too much effort to get to basic information."
Facebook’s facelift separates users’ personal profiles into different areas of the site and provides more tools that are meant to make it easier to share information and photos.
The gradual approach differed from how Zuckerberg and the rest of Facebook’s unusually young management team have managed past revisions to the site.
In 2006, Facebook launched a controversial feature known as “News Feed” which posted friends’ online activities on the site. Many users saw the feature as an eerie form of cyberstalking.
Last year, Facebook faced another revolt when it rolled out a tracking device, dubbed "Beacon," that tracked and shared information about users’ shopping habits and other activities at other Web sites.
In both instances, Zuckerberg was prompted to make a formal apology to the site’s users.
With Facebook’s audience now roughly 10 times larger than when news feeds first came out two years ago, Zuckerberg understood he needed to do a better job preparing for changes.
"There is more weight on making things smooth when you are dealing with 100 million people," he said. "No one cared as much when a bunch of students from a few colleges were complaining about some changes to some Web site."
Although he is still hoping to persuade Zuckerberg to retreat from some of the changes included in the redesign, Sanders suspects resistance might be futile this time.
"I definitely won’t stop using Facebook because it’s still the best social network out there," said Sanders, who has been using the site for two years. "People will probably protest the changes in the beginning, but then they will just get used to them."
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