Facebook CEO Backtracks Amid News Feed Protests

After three days of calamitous protest, Facebook has issued a mea culpa and a slew of new privacy features following a widely unpopular update made to the site.

Within hours of the launch of News Feed Tuesday night-a feature designed to inform users of when and how their friends update their profiles-thousands of users banded together to protest the changes. Amid growing outrage, company founder Mark Zuckerberg formally apologized Friday morning for how the updates had been implemented and announced a new slate of privacy options to mitigate privacy concerns.

"We really messed this one up," Zuckerberg wrote in the open letter. "When we launched News Feed and Mini-Feed we were trying to provide you with a stream of information about your social world. Instead, we did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them."

Under the new features released on Friday, users have full control over what information is and is not broadcast over News Feed.

Though the site has achieved a reputation for savvy business decisions-a reputation that helped the company snag an exclusive advertising deal with Microsoft-this is not the company's first gaffe. In 2004, the Facebook team spent months designing Wirehog, a program designed to facilitate file- and photo-sharing between friends; however, the clunky software-based application failed to draw an audience. Additionally, Facebook received bad press earlier this year when 20-year-old Brooklyn resident Elvin Chaung solicited naked photos and videos from dozens of New York students, including several at Columbia, whose contact information he found on Facebook.

"It's invasive, I guess," Phaedra Polychronis, BC '07, said of News Feed. "It just makes you want to do a lot less because everything is reported," though she added that she felt better about the service now that the new security features had been added.

Despite the additional privacy measure, the company may not be in the clear. A number of reports throughout the week have speculated that since News Feed presents information for which users would previously have had to search, the feature could cut down on page views, thus decreasing advertising revenues.

Since its launch 30 months ago, the site has registered nearly 10 million users; according to comScore, which measures Internet traffic, it is the seventh-most visited site on the Web. According to a survey released earlier this summer, users spend an average of 16 minutes on the site daily, with half of all users checking their accounts every day.