A College Student Laments Facebook Changes

As a teenager, social networking has been a part of my life for about four years now. You can imagine my excitement when I was invited to join FaceBook as a high school senior. Until then, Facebook had been the college-only social networking site, but they had just started allowing high school students to join on an invitation basis. I was completely addicted to Facebook after that and this obsession continued until this past summer.

About 6 months ago, Facebook began to allow anyone with an email address to join; and despite all of the petition groups to turn Facebook back to college only, it continues to allow anyone with an email address to join. While this attempt to turn Facebook into a MySpace style social networking site annoyed me, I was still satisfied with their services and FaceBook was the only way that I was connected to many of my friends.

My excitement ended when I was introduced to the new ‘applications’ that you can add to your page. Some of them were fun, you could add iLike to share the bands and music you like, but some of them were annoying, and you had to read about how Joey “Bit another victim” with his vampire. On top of this, they had deleted the courses application, possibly the only useful original application in terms of college classes. When you added a class to your schedule, you added it to FaceBook under courses and you could see who was in your class. This was useful because you could find that really cool person who sat next to you in Calculus class, and if you ever missed a class, you could message them and find out what you missed.

So now I find myself checking FaceBook maybe once a week, and when I do check it, I have to scroll through a string of zombie and vampire applications. I think that FaceBook realized they were the next big thing in social-networking and increased their user numbers and page amounts to boost their profits, in exchange for many of their earlier users’ satisfaction.