PRIVACY. Sure you can control some privacy settings. But the settings are all or nothing. And I'm ever necessarily talking about that picture of you from college. Say I want to publish something that only my Portland friends see, like "going out to the Pearl. Meet me there." I don't need to publish that to my friends and family around the world. But guess what, there is no way to avoid that. You cannot use lists to post only to specific groups. You can't exempt specific people from one post. This a huge problem. Google wave, not released yet, has fixed this. If facebook is not careful, they are going to be in big trouble. I agree that a lot of people were complaining about the change in layout simply because they don't like change. I'm complaining that facebook is not improving or changing quickly enough, and the functional changes that have been made suck. Why is facebook trying to turn into twitter? Is facebook that insecure? One of the cool things about facebook used to be that you could go on a friend's wall, mock him publicly, so that your other friends could see and all laugh at him. That has become impossible unless you don't care if your grandma, boss, and neighbor's 3 year old kid see you dress down your buddy. Obviously, among friends this is all in good fun, but other people who you are "friends" with might not understand that.

Also, facebook is and always has been better than myspace. Myspace is a terrible jumbled mess that became popular on the west coast only because not many people had access to facebook.

I personally wonder if this is a problem that is going to be the end of Facebook. I looked at the blog, "Oh Crap, My Parents Joined Facebook" a while back and thought Facebook should make a blog entitled, "Oh Crap, Parents are joining Facebook." Seeing some of the postings on this blog made me laugh like crazy, but it did make me think that the teens would soon be fleeing Facebook because it was no longer cool. Hey, if Mom is Facebooking then Facebook is something old people do. ;) I supposed if Facebook made changes like you suggest, they could save themselves. Teens wouldn't have to worry about broadcasting their wall posts that their parents would make awkward comments on. If, however, Facebook does not address this issue, some other social networking company is going to open up and fill in that gap. Heck, maybe they'll even start where Facebook did, and only allow students to join. Then all the young people will flock to the new site where they can be themselves again without worrying about any parental snooping. The cycle will start all over again. And while they are at it, Facebook should allow you to delete more than one email at a time, and without asking you "are you sure you want to delete?" every damn time. So annoying.

The privacy thing I've never understood is why you can limit your profile visibility for a "friend" who is really an acquaintance, but if on a stupid whim you do decide to take one of those stupid quizzes, the application's owners get to see your entire profile, including (so I'm told) some data that you needed to sign up but isn't actually on your profile page. That's why your spam levels will go up even if your e-mail address isn't public.

gadgetgirl02:

The privacy thing I've never understood is why you can limit your profile visibility for a "friend" who is really an acquaintance, but if on a stupid whim you do decide to take one of those stupid quizzes, the application's owners get to see your entire profile, including (so I'm told) some data that you needed to sign up but isn't actually on your profile page. That's why your spam levels will go up even if your e-mail address isn't public.

I should have known that, but I didn't. And I'm one of those annoying bastards who completes a dozen quizzes a week.

Amen, RGillette2882! This is by and far the most annoying part of Facebook. Do my work contacts really need to know I want to go have a beer in twenty minutes? Do they need to know where I'm going? No, so I end up not posting at all. It's destroying the part of Facebook that's most useful and interesting to me: The ability to easily plan activities with large groups of friends. Fine, if I'm having a party I can set up an event, but what if I just have a question I know a *subset* of my friends (who range from intimates to people I barely remember from high school to work contacts I've only "met" via phone) can answer? Or I want *some* of them to know I'll be somewhere in 30 minutes? Adding to the irritation, you can't even use the e-mail function to message more than 20 people so if your Portland friends, for instance, are more than 20 strong, you're screwed. Those friend lists are pretty much useless. LAME, Facebook, LAME.