Facebook structure
News Feed[edit]
On September 6, 2006, Ruchi Sanghvi announced a new home page feature called News Feed.[1] Originally, when users logged into Facebook, they were presented with a customizable version of their own profile. The new layout, by contrast, created an alternative home page in which users saw a constantly updated list of their friends' Facebook activity. News Feed highlights information that includes profile changes, upcoming events, and birthdays, among other updates. This has enabled spammers and other users to manipulate these features by creating illegitimate events or posting fake birthdays to attract attention to their profile or cause.[2] News Feed also shows conversations taking place between the walls of a user's friends. An integral part of the News Feed interface is the Mini Feed, a news stream on the user's profile page that shows updates about that user. Unlike in the News Feed, the user can delete events from the Mini Feed after they appear so that they are no longer visible to profile visitors. In 2011 Facebook updated the News Feed to show top stories and most recent stories in one feed, and the option to highlight stories to make them top stories, as well as to un-highlight stories. In response to users' criticism, Facebook later updated the News Feed to allow users to view recent stories first.[3]
Initially, the addition of the News Feed caused some discontent among Facebook users. Many users complained that the News Feed was too cluttered with excess information. Others were concerned that the News Feed made it too easy for other people to track activities like changes in relationship status, events, and conversations with other users. This tracking is often casually referred to as "Facebook-Stalking".[4] In response to this dissatisfaction, creator Mark Zuckerberg issued an apology for the site's failure to include appropriate customizable privacy features. Thereafter, users were able to control what types of information were shared automatically with friends.[5] Currently, users may prevent friends from seeing updates about several types of especially private activities, although other events are not customizable in this way.[6]
With the introduction of the "New Facebook" in early February 2010 came a complete redesign of the pages, several new features and changes to News Feeds.[7] On their personal Feeds (now integrated with Walls), users were given the option of removing updates from any application as well as choosing the size they show up on the page. Furthermore, the community feed (containing recent actions by the user's friends) contained options to instantly select whether to hear more or less about certain friends or applications.[8]
On March 7, 2013, Facebook has announced a redesigned newsfeed.[9]
Friend[edit]
"Unfriend" redirects here. For the 2014 film, see Unfriend (film).
See also: Friending
"Friending" someone is the act of sending another user a friend request on Facebook. The two people are Facebook friends once the receiving party accepts the friend request. In addition to accepting the request, the user has the option of declining the friend request or hiding it using the "Not Now" feature. Deleting a friend request removes the request, but does allow the sender to resend it in the future. The "Not Now" feature hides the request but does not delete it, allowing the receiver to revisit the request at a later date.
It is also possible to remove a user from one's friends, which is referred to as "unfriending" by Facebook.[10] Many Facebook users also refer to the process as "de-friending".[11]"Unfriend" was New Oxford American Dictionary's word of the year in 2009.[12][13] Facebook does not notify a user if they have been unfriended, but there are scripts that provide this functionality. There has also been a study on why Facebook users unfriend, which found that differences, especially between ages, and few mutual friendships were the dominant factors correlated with unfriending, all of which mirrors the decline of physical-world relationships.[14]
Facebook profiles also have advanced privacy features to restrict content to certain users, such as non-friends or persons on a specific list.
Wall[edit]
The Wall is the original profile space where Facebook users' content, as of December 2011, had been displayed. It allowed the posting of messages, often short or temporal notes, for the user to see while displaying the time and date the message was written. A user's Wall is visible to anyone with the ability to see his or her full profile, and friends' Wall posts appear in the user's News Feed.
In July 2007, Facebook allowed users to post attachments to the Wall, whereas previously the Wall was limited to text only.[15] In May 2008, the Wall-to-Wall for each profile was limited to only 40 posts. Facebook later allowed users to insert HTML code in boxes attached to the wall via apps like Static FBML which has allowed marketers to track use of their fan pages with Google Analytics.[16]
The concept of tagging in status updates, an attempt to imitate Twitter,[17] began September 14, 2009.[18] This meant putting the name of a user, a brand, an event or a group[18] in a post in such a way that it linked to the wall of the Facebook page being tagged, and made the post appear in news feeds for that page, as well as those of selected friends.[19]This was first done using the "@" symbol followed by the person's name. Later, a numerical ID for the person could be used.[20] Early in 2011, tagging in comments was added.[21]
In addition to postings by other users, the Wall also displayed other events that happened to the user's profile. This included when information was changed, when they changed their profile picture, and when they connected with new people, among other things.
The Wall has been replaced by the Timeline profile layout, which was introduced in December 2011.
Timeline[edit]
Since December 15, 2011, a Timeline is the new virtual space in which all the content of Facebook users is organized and shown.[22] Replacing the Facebook Profile, in a Timeline the photos, videos, and posts of any given user are categorized according to the period of time in which they were uploaded or created.[22] Posts and events are displayed along a timeline that runs through the center of the profile, with the option of adding events that occurred prior to the user joining Facebook as well as "hiding" posts.[23][24] Some experts saw this as a crucial step on the use of social networks.[25] In March 2012, Timeline became available for "Facebook Pages", and by the end of the month, Facebook had forced all Facebook Pages (not Profile pages) to convert to the Timeline layout, against the will of many page admins.[clarification needed] Like the Wall, users can set Timeline privacy settings to change who can see their entire profile. Users' friends have the ability to post messages on the user's Timeline. Using Facebook on certain devices, such as iPads, may result in automatic adoption of the Timeline. In August 2012, Profile pages were forced to change to the Timeline layout.
Like[edit]
Like
Main article: Like button
Described by Facebook as a way to "give positive feedback and connect with things you care about", users can "like" status updates, comments, photos, and links posted by their friends, as well as adverts, by clicking the "Like" button at the bottom of the content.[26] This makes the content appear in their friends'News feeds.[27]
The "Like Button" is also available for use on websites outside Facebook: "When the user clicks the Like button on [a] site, a story appears in the user's friends' News Feed with a link back to [the] website".[28] At the same time when any visitor, including non Facebook members and logged out users, visit a site with the Like Button, their presence on the site is recorded by Facebook.[29] Introduced in April 2010, by September 2010 over 350,000 sites had installed it.[30] A "Like Box" also allows Facebook page owners to see how many users and which of their friends like the page.[31] From the end of 2010 and in the United States, Microsoft's Bing search engine identifies which links in the results have been "Liked" by the searcher's Facebook friends.[32][33] However, Md. Ziaul Haque, a poet, columnist, scholar, researcher and a faculty member of the English department at Sylhet International University, Bangladesh, made a very clear-cut and definite suggestion about the necessity of a 'Sympathise' button for Facebook through proper example. According to him, the 'Like' button is not enough since the users cannot press the 'Like' button when a friend posts a status about the death of a loved one. He posted a status on Facebook on Aug 30, 2012 about the introduction of a 'Sympathise' button. The status was: "I find it really strange or weird especially when someone clicks the 'Like' option even when his friend faced an accident. How can we 'like' this phenomenon when the concerned person is not happy? I think my Facebook friends must agree with me on this note. According to me, Mark Zuckerberg should think seriously about this and add another option just beside the 'Like' button. I suggest that "Sympathise" can be the most suitable option".[34] Besides, about the necessity of 'Sympathise' button, he wrote a poem titled “Mr. Zuckerberg, Are You Listening?” [35] and posted online on 6 December 2013. According to Time (magazine), Facebook is considering to introduce a "sympathize button".[36]
A lawsuit was filed in Los Angeles in 2010 claiming the Facebook should not allow minors to "like" advertising; Facebook said the suit was "completely without merit".[37] Because websites with a "Like Button" send IP address information of all visitors to Facebook, the German state of Schleswig-Holstein said in August 2011 that the button breaches Germandata protection laws and that federal agencies should remove the buttons and similar social plugins from their websites.[38] Canada's Privacy Commissioner raised similar concerns in 2010.[39] "Like" links are vulnerable to likejacking, a form of clickjacking that makes users "Like" content they did not intend to.[40]
In August 2011, Google linked their +1 button to Google Plus to rival the Facebook Like Button.[42]
Messages and inbox[edit]
Since the website's founding, it has allowed users to send messages to each other.[43] A Facebook user can send a message to any number of his/her friends at a time. Deleting a message from one's inbox does not delete it from the inbox of other users, thus disabling a sender to undo a message sent by him or her.
On November 15, 2010, Facebook announced a new "Facebook Messages" service. In a media event that day, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, "It's true that people will be able to have a @facebook.com email addresses, but it's not email". The launch of such a feature had been anticipated for some time before the announcement, with some calling it a "Gmailkiller". The system, to be available to all of the website's users, combines text messaging, instant messaging, emails, and regular messages, and will include privacy settings similar to those of other Facebook services.
Notifications[edit]
Notifications are what inform the user that an addition has been added to his or her profile page. Examples of common notifications include: a message being shared on the user's wall or a comment on a picture of the user or on a picture that the user has previously commented on. The amount of notifications can be changed in the settings section. A red counter is updated on the toolbar at the top of the page, thus allowing the user to keep track of all the most recent notifications and additions to the user's profile page. The maximum amount of notifications is 99.
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