The date was September 5, 2006, and Facebook, the enormously popular social networking website, unveiled its newest features: the “News Feed” and “Mini-Feed”. The first of the features appears on every Facebook member’s home page, showing their friends’ latest Facebook activities. The second feature, the Mini-Feed, is a module on each member’s profile page, displaying a log of his or her own Facebook activities.

Although members were allowed to manually delete items from their respective Mini-Feeds, the News Feed offered no such privacy controls. Whether or not a user wanted his friends to know about what he or did on Facebook, his actions were broadcast to the News Feeds of every person on their friends list. Many users found this “Facebook Facelift”, as it was popularly dubbed, “stalker-ish” and “creepy”. Even though these features did not allow users to access any more information than they had been able to before, many people thought that by compiling so much information in one place, Facebook had made stalking too easy.

The day of the release many Facebook groups arose in protest of the new features. The most successful of these groups popped up just hours after the release when Northwestern University junior, Ben Parr, created the group “Students against Facebook News Feed (Official Petition to Facebook)”. Within a few days, the group’s membership had proliferated to over 700,000 people, roughly 8% of Facebook’s immense user base. At its height, there were roughly 500 users joining the group every minute.

But how could this Facebook epidemic spread so quickly? The beauty of the situation lies in its irony – that the News Feed itself made such a pandemic possible.

But before I describe just how the News Feed catalyzed its own chorus of disapproval, let me explain the basic architecture of social networks on Facebook. Unlike in face-to-face relationships, Facebook does not differentiate between strong and weak ties. Virtually everyone a college student meets results in a Facebook “friendship”. For example, I have over 300 “Facebook-friends” even though I only actually consider about 10 of them to be my close friends. Accordingly, the vast majority (roughly 97% in my case) of “Facebook-friends” are weak ties.

In predominantly face-to-face relationships, people are more likely to share information through their strong ties. Since strong ties generally occur within densely connected groups of friends, this tendency makes it much less likely that the information will spread to many people. As illustrated by Granovetter’s paper, The Strength of Weak Ties, sharing information with weak ties increases the probability that it will spread quickly. However, since people are by nature less likely to share information through weak ties, this outbreak of information happens only infrequently.

What makes the News Feed such an effective way of sharing information is its equalization of strong ties and weak ties. The News Feed makes a Facebook user’s activities available to all of his “Facebook friends” regardless of tie strength. What’s more, since the News Feed is on every Facebook user’s homepage, the information it provides is virtually unavoidable. This information ranges from relationship status (e.g. “in a relationship with…”, “single”, etc.) to events that a user is attending to groups a user joins. This brings me back to my original point: how the News Feed perpetuated the virtual riot against itself. When users joined a group opposing the News Feed, the fact that they had joined would appear on all of their friends’ News Feeds, thereby spreading the news like wild fire. (In my case, the fact that I joined one of these groups, and therefore the knowledge of the group itself, was broadcast to hundreds of people.) As a result, people discovered the protest groups from their News Feeds and joined them, thereby disseminating them further at a mind-boggling pace.

Even today, now that the dissonance has died down, the News Feed still serves as an extremely potent avenue of spreading information. Late one night, for instance, a close friend of mine and a boy she had liked decided to enter into a formal relationship. Without telling anyone, she and her then boyfriend updated their Facebook relationship statuses so that the change would appear on the News Feeds of their “Facebook friends”. Within hours, almost everyone in their social networks (and well beyond) had learned the news.

The importance of this sort of information dissemination should not be overlooked. In a society obsessed with information, the News Feed is an extremely effective source for both gathering and propagating information. It gives rise to a vastly different way of examining how information spreads, and indicates that we still need a great deal of research to examine how such technological capabilities change the ways people interact with information and with each other.

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1532225,00.html

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1533289,00.html