Don’t get me wrong; I’m an avid user of this social networking site and I think it’s a great way to connect to and communicate with friends who are scattered all over the globe in a casual and informal manner, but there’s something about Facebook that seems to always rub me the wrong way. First it was the privacy settings – remember that infamous incident when Facebook took the liberty of deciding what was private and what was not instead of letting you control what you shared with the world at large? It was audacious enough to reset your privacy settings and revert your profile to the default without even letting you know! This was enough to make a few wise people beat a hasty retreat – they swore off Facebook forever. But for the rest of us weak souls, we stayed on, hoping that things will change for the better and that Facebook will get its act together and start respecting the views and opinions of its 500 million users. But apparently the social networking giant is still hell-bent on poking its nose where it does not belong, as is apparent in the changes to the News Feed section. If you look at the top right corner of your News Feed page, you will find two buttons – one that says Top News and the other which says Most Recent. Now Most Recent is supposed to give you exactly that – the most recent news; and Top News is Facebook’s idea of filtering content to decide what is important and what is not. Now however, even Recent News is filtered according to the friends you interact with the most, so you would see only posts from friends you’ve been communicating with or whose status updates you’ve been commenting on (and vice versa). Now tell me, how does this constitute Recent News? And if you thought that was the end, there’s more bad news in store, especially if you have a Fan Page on Facebook. Posts on your Page are now sorted not by chronological order (or Most Recent), but by what Facebook deems important or relevant. So you could have fans and visitors posting on your Wall, you could be sending out status updates, but you don’t know when Facebook is going to consider them “relevant” and publish them. How helpful is this when time is of the essence for the information you need to send out? Apparently Facebook thinks this is what users want – go figure! The resultant uproar has seen the creation of a Fan Page – Bring Back Chronological Posts on Pages – but then, this Page too is a victim of the atrocity that it is protesting against; none of the comments and status updates are chronological, so there is no way of assessing who said what when. Change, for the sake of change alone, is not really useful; in fact, it is downright detrimental for all concerned. And when you factor in the fact that Facebook has 500 million users and counting, doesn’t it make sense to do what’s in their best interests, especially when you depend on them to keep your network up and running? Perhaps Facebook thinks it is sitting pretty atop the popularity heap – it knows it has a good thing going and that people who are in find it pretty hard to get out because if they do, they stand to lose much more than their circle of friends. Facebook has become a marketer’s dream, an informal platform to connect and interact with customers and clients and reach out to them to augment and improve businesses and services. This and many other factors make it hard to give this social network the complete cold shoulder, but even so, Facebook should know that people power will ultimately rule the roost. Remember Egypt?