Back to Home > Friday, Sep 08, 2006 Business Posted on Fri, Sep. 08, 2006 email this print this <... Facebook's automated a

The operators of the online hangout Facebook wanted to help users save time by highlighting changes their friends make to their personal profile pages. Instead, the new feature has drawn complaints from thousands of its users and even threats of a boycott.

The backlash is over the Palo Alto company's decision this week to deliver automated, customized alerts known as News Feeds about a user's closest friends, classmates and colleagues. Users who log on might instantly find out that someone they know has joined a new social group, posted more photos or begun dating their best friend.

A protest group created on the site, Students Against Facebook News Feeds, had more than 600,000 members by Thursday, and more than 80,000 people had electronically endorsed a petition against the feature. A Web journal has been set up calling for users to boycott the site Tuesday, a week after the feature's debut.

Details of a user's profile, including contact information, relationship status and hobbies, are generally hidden from others unless those people are already part of that user's network of friends or institution, such as a college.

In addition, users have the option of hiding specific details from certain users, even ones already designated as friends -- choosing, for instance, to show photos to college buddies but not to co-workers.

To join, one must prove membership in an existing network using an e-mail address from a college, a high school or selected companies and organizations. As a result, Facebook has fewer than 10 million registered users, compared with some 108 million at News Corp.'s MySpace.

All of the information presented had been available before, but a person had to visit a friend's profile page and make note of any changes -- for example, noticing that the friend now has 103 friends instead of 102, and identifying which one got added.

Zuckerberg said people ``can spend 10 to 20 minutes going through all the information in individual profiles.'' The new feature, he said, was meant to ``surface the most interesting changes'' made by a user's closest friends.

Chris Hughes, co-founder of the 2-year-old privately held company, said Facebook's software analyzes such factors as how often one communicates with a friend or views that friend's profile in determining whom a user deems most important.

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