In what almost seems like a response to the latest trend of twitter coverage in the media (Martha Stewart, Colbert, CNN, Daily Show, etc...) in the past week, Facebook has announced big changes to be arriving next week.

In a blog post, Facebook outlined a new redesign to the controversial News Feed release last year to mixed reviews.  The fresh News Feed will update live and on the fly. Users will be able to sit at their computer with a bag of Cheatos and watch as their friends post pictures of themselves sitting at their computers eating Cheatos (anyone else notice all the Cheatos ads around the web lately?).


The entirety of Facebook will now update in the browser window without the user having to press refresh. This makes the almost hidden refresh button placement of the new Safari toolbar make more sense.


I believe most of the people who were against the last News Feed update will find the new design to their liking.  It is far more structural and graphical, with user images appearing next to every post.

Most curious is the silent drop of the "is" from the beginning facebook statuses and the question "What are you Doing Now?" changing to "What's on you mind?". This can be seen as a direct attack on twitter and it will be interesting to see how the growing social network will distinguish itself from the monolithic Facebook in the coming weeks.

The biggest changes for online communicators are those coming to the company/celebrity pages. The pages will now function identical to personal profiles, including all updates such as status, pictures, events will appear in their followers News Feed. No longer will company/celebrity pages be second class citizens doomed to messages that no one reads.


These changes are just another step towards facebook becoming a platform that all web content will be hosted or linked through. Hopefully it doesn't become self-aware in the future and attack us all. (see the new Terminator Salvation trailer here.)

     I came across this article recently outlining what seems to be a potential issue for those of us using technology to communicate.

     One thing the article discusses is that the Department of Justice states that of all the stalking and harassment victims 23% of the stalkers used some sort of cyberstalking, which may or may not include text messages.  The president of the volunteer organization WHOA (Working to Halt Online Abuse ), Jayne Hitchcock, claims that the sense of anonymity the comes when using a device to send a message tends to embolden people.

     I feel Ms. Hitchcock has her finger on the pulse of the issue, yet is incorrect in her verbal description about the patient's vital signs.  She claims stalkers have a sense of anonymity when sending a message via a device, that is not always true.  Stalkers who use devices to harass others do feel emboldened not because of the sense of anonymity; I feel stalkers are emboldened because the face to face interaction that comes when sending a message via a device isn't there.  The percentage of the group of 23% who feel this sense of "embolden" when using devices to send messages are more likely not going to "stalk" or "harass" their victims if they were forced to do so face to face with their victims.

     One can argue, validly I think, that an individual is less likely to speak forcefully against or about another individual if we always must face those who we are speaking about when they are absent.  Granted this isn't always the case, their are times when we are angry and say exactly what we are thinking.  Then there are other times when  individuals just don't care about other people's emotions.

     But, the emboldened people Ms. Hitchcock speaks of don't use these devices because of the anonymity that comes with it. 

     Further, the class I am currently in recently read works titled Information Ecologies, and The Social Life of Information, by Nardi and O'Day and Brown and Duguid respectively.  In these works, they discuss how those who speak about various fantastic things technology will be able to do for us in the future.  The authors also discuss much more practical ways of predicting how society will adopt various types of technology.

     So, this article made me think, could anyone predict "texting" would be used to stalk or harass potential victims?