Facebook changes: Are we all cry babies or should we be concerned?

Over the past few days the social network everyone loves to hate has made some big changes and although there are a few dotted about here, there and everywhere, most of them have been made to the News Feed.

The Facebook team wrote up a detailed blog post about what’s different, but the basic premise is that you can now keep up with your friends regardless of when you last signed in. So this means even if you haven’t checked Facebook in a whole week, the stories that matter to you the most (or so Facebook thinks) will be at the top of your News Feed.

As well as these featured posts and stories, there’s also a ‘ticker’ which lets you see all kinds of activity instantly in real time.

Now as an avid Facebook user I get that these changes are a bit strange. I don’t think they suit me in many ways, but at the end of the day, they’re just a few changes here and there to a free social network that no one is tying you down at gun point to use, so why have SO many users been getting SO irritated and SO agressive?

The backlash has been huge with many voicing their opinions on their personal profiles and thousands more expressing their disgust in the comments under the official blog post we mentioned earlier.

Many of the users that aren’t swearing and speaking ONLY IN CAPS are making some good points, the changes just don’t seem to work for everyone.

The first problem is that Facebook is trying to understand what we want to read, but take a look at the featured stories in your feed, are they all things you really care about more than the other things lurking at the bottom? Probably not. We get that Facebook is trying to make things easier and help us out, but we want control over what we see, what we read and over what we think is important to us or not.

The second problem is the news ticker, it doesn’t seem very Facebook does it? Instant news flashing up in real time looks more like a Twitter feature or something we’d expect to see on the BBC website.

However, I’m sure you’ll find if you rewind back a few years the beloved things you’re so sad are changing now were things you complained about in the past too. After all, things can’t just stay the same forever now can they, especially when Facebook is trying to set itself apart from its competitors and evolve into something more useful.

So, you have a few options:

The first one is something I know you’re not going to like and that’s to just learn to love the changes, you’ve done it before and you’re still using Facebook so it can’t be THAT hard.

The second is to wait to see if you can tweak settings in the future, Cnet has already written up a way to get rid of the ticker if it’s really annoying you, so expect more workarounds from Facebook itself or other places in the next few weeks.

The third option is to admit defeat and stop using the social network. It’ll be a hard habit to kick and you may regret it if there are some amazing announcements made at Facebook’s f8 developers conference later, but if it’s making you that angry, why not?

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