Thankfully, after three days of steady complaint, Facebook has done _something_ about the “News Feed” to calm our vexations. Early this morning, Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook, posted to the Facebook blog (which was also simultaneously glued to the top of everyone’s “News Feed” – BUT with a nice little option to ‘Hide’) an open letter of apology. “We really messed this one up,” he says right off the bat…
|=.!http://jewlofthelotus.com/files/2006-09-08_letterquote.png (letterquote)!|

Apology accepted. While I’d still like to see more extensive privacy control (click “HERE”:http://jewlofthelotus.com/files/privacyoptions.png to see *current* privacy options), I’d like to thank the Facebook team for working so diligently and quickly to fix the problem. For a while there, especially after the last Facebook blog entry “Calm down. Breathe. We hear you,”:http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=2208197130 (which pretty much accomplished nothing), I was worried that we’d be waiting weeks before changes were made. But you surprised me, Facebook. You _realized_ there was a big problem, worked your asses off to create a functional solution, and implemented it _before_ your subscribers had the opportunity to become bored with their efforts to insist change (in which case[boredom], you probably would have lost thousands of users).

“Gen Y’s first official revolution,” as “Time.com”:http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1532225,00.html?cnn=yes suggested, may have been a small one, and perhaps somewhat insignificant (when you toss all the other serious problems that face the world into the mix), but maybe it’s put us on the right track. At least now the world knows that Generation Y can make a difference, maybe this is only the beginning. Maybe now that we’ve got our activism juices flowing, we’ll find the inspiration to work at other issues we feel strongly about but have never had the courage to act on.

So thanks for working with us, Facebook. Now that that’s all done and over with, I say, “Yeah, okay. I can work with this feed thing.” But how about you do me one more favor and make mine work? Since it’s debut, my News Feed has not updated with any new content, it’s just gradually all disappeared. And today it looks like this:
|=.!http://jewlofthelotus.com/files/2006-09-08_empty_feed_oh_no.png (Empty Feed, oh no!!)!|

So once again….wtf, Facebook?