It was a normal day of the week, just like any other Wednesday. My boyfriend Tevin and his roommate Dan were both on their computers, browsing the internet, and I was slumped in a chair across the room. An exclamation from Dan caught our attention --prompting us to, "Check out the new Facebook". Tevin swiveled around to make the sarcastic reply: "Hey, did you guys know: now you can Facebook while you Facebook!" The mock-excitement in his voice peeked my curiosity. Later that evening, when logging onto Facebook myself, I realized what they had been talking about.
The social networking site known as Facebook has undergone many alterations since its creation in February of 2004. However, the latest platform claims to entirely modify the way in which people interact online. This new upgrade, also known as Facebook Open Graph, has a variety of features intended for ease of access when posting and sharing information. Mark Zuckerburg, creator and founder of Facebook, announced these new improvements at the 2011 F8 Conference in San Francisco, California.
What once was a simple screen is now partitioned into a real-time scroll with a permanently opened chat - and that's just the beginning. A feature called "Timeline" is now used to express a person's media history: following their every move on the site based off "social-apps", from what kind of music you listen to all the way to what kind of toothpaste you use: based off what you "like" and comment on. If this brand-stalking isn't enough for you, you can always watch out for someone's "check-ins" and "location shares": a tool allowing users to tell all of the online community where they are and what they are doing at any given second, while, at the same time, promoting and advertising the associated brands and locations.
I have had a Facebook account since 2007, my freshman year of high school. Back then, Facebook was used more on the collegiate level --a way for undergraduate and graduate students to socialize themselves with members of their own campuses. Then BOOM! The site literally exploded, the fan-base extending into high schools --even middle schools. It seemed that everyone had a Facebook. Since then, Facebook has changed further: except, this time, the change is in the functionality of the site itself.
The new homepage is, perhaps, what has changed most predominantly: despite previous Facebook modifications, the homepage has never been so drastically altered as it is now. The entire outlook of the site is different. All of your news is now in one place. Top stories since you last visited are at the top, each top story is now marked with a blue corner, and recent stories are found below, in the order they were posted. Rather than having "Most Recent" news, there is a category labeled as "Top News": which is determined based on your relationships to people, how many "likes" it got, how many people commented on it, etc.
Logging onto Facebook, now, I can navigate away from my homepage to a friend's profile --while still being able to see the latest postings on the right-hand side of the screen. You can Facebook while you Facebook: quite literally. Of all the format changes that I have seen throughout my Facebooking career, F8 is, by far, the most complex, the most different, the most innovatively creepy: bringing Facebook-stalking to a whole new level.
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