Category: blogging

Student protests, the Facebook way

Or, All we are saying is give feeds a chance…

Facebook‘s recent changes that allow online buddies keep closer tabs on each other has half a million Facebook users — many of them college students — up in arms. The Facebookers fear the tweaks create a “creepy” and “stalker-esque” atmosphere on the social networking site.

The changes come in the form of news feeds that notify users when their friends have uploaded new photos or changed their profiles in some other fashion.

A disgruntled user has created a petition urging Facebook to go back to its old-school ways. As it currently stands, “We all know who has dumped who, who is doing what, and who doesn’t like something anymore. This is invasive, and while it is displayed for others to see, it is not meant to bombard their homepage.” (Source: Digital Micro Markets, which tongue-in-cheekedly likens the protest to the civil rights protests of the 1960s and suggests that “the thousands of unhappy, non-paying users of Facebook can … use their allowance pools to hack an online social networking cool app more to their liking!”)

Meanwhile, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is urging calm. “We are listening to all your suggestions about how to improve the product; it’s brand new and still evolving.”

I don’t get why the subscribers are so upset. When you join a social network on the web, you’re forfeiting quite a bit of privacy and are tacitly agreeing to live a fishbowl sort of life, at least to your closest online friends. But perhaps this will be a wake-up call for millennials to think about issues of privacy and use a bit more caution in who they let into their social networks.

Dude, you’re getting a battery recall: consumer advocacy in cyberspace

Bloggers and cyberjournalists are getting some credit for keeping the pressure on Dell to recall batteries that had the potential to catch fire.

This Business Week article traces how the blogosphere became a consumer advocacy network over several weeks this summer. It began on June 21, when the Inquirer, “a British ‘tabloid-style’ news site for techies, published a series of shocking photographs showing a Dell notebook computer in flames at a tech conference in Japan. The photos and an account of the incident came from ‘Gaston,’ the pseudonum of a loyal Inquirer reader who did not want to be identified because he’s in the computer business.”

The story grew legs and ran all over cyberspace.

“Industry analysts were soon e-mailing their take to mainstream reporters and investors,” Business Week reports. Soon, “Gadget news blogs like Gizmodo and Engadget spat out facts and rumors with equal zeal. They were relentless advocates for the consumer, too. On July 31, Engadget posted photos of a Dell notebook that had caught fire in Singapore. Its comment: ‘We’ll keep posting these until we see a recall or a solution, so please, Dell, treat ’em right.'”

The cybermedia didn’t merely expose the dangers of computers catching fire. They kept the heat on the manufacturers to do something about it and helped the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) conduct an investigation into the burning batteries.

Link via BuzzMachine.