Facebook receives unnecessary makeover
The social networking service’s new qualities have many questioning its sudden facelift
By Kelly McCormick, contributing writer
Posted on September 7, 2006

We’re all guilty of Facebook stalking, and we know it.  Admit it, you have used Facebook.com once or twice to find someone you may have met at a party and then browsed a little further to find out some extra information about them. 

Facebook does have its legitimate uses — finding screen names to get in touch with group members, apartment numbers of a party you may be attending and even reuniting with those long lost friends you haven’t seen or talked to since high school, perhaps even elementary school.

However, the “face” of Facebook has recently undergone a little makeover. Now, not only can you see who your friends are friends with, but also who they have recently become friends with, whose wall they may have written on and even if they have become single in the past few days. The end of a relationship is bad enough, so does Facebook really need to broadcast it to all those people whose random friend requests you have accepted over the last few years?

“Originally I used Facebook to connect with people from high school and elementary school that I lost track of,” senior Lori Craley said. “People are always joking about how you can stalk people by looking at their pictures, but honestly, I don’t know if I want to use Facebook anymore if it stays like this. I feel like I’m invading people’s privacy.”

Maybe this is an overreaction, but judging from everyone’s updated status reports, (thank you mini-feed) and the general consensus of friends and classmates, these new features on Facebook seem somewhat creepy, and even a tad bit stalker-like. If it is really that important to find out who updated their profile picture recently, or removed ”The O.C.” as one of their favorite shows, then it is easy to click on that person’s profile and read the given information.