Facebook, America's number two social network behind MySpace, launched a redesign and two new features early this morning, allowing a user's activities on the site to be tracked.
The second feature is Mini-Feed, a new section on your profile page that displays your latest updates all in one place, so that visitors can get a quick overview of all your activities. This is also a privacy concern, but Facebook point out that all of this data was public before - they also allow you to remove stories from your Mini-Feed that you don't want to appear. What's more, your privacy settings still apply: other users can only see the data that you've allowed them to see in the past.
These additions might seem fairly small, but they could have a major effect on how users interact with the site: will you be more cautious if you know your friends are being updated with news of your activities? Will users poke around less now they have all the updates on one page? Or perhaps the feeds will entice them to visit more pages, and become addicted to the stream of updates, just like a feedreader? I've heard complaints before about sites (eg. Stardoll) that display the latest visitors to your profile page - in many ways, Facebook's new tools are more invasive. My guess is that if they'd allowed Facebook users to turn this feature off, most of them would have done so.
What's odd is that most of Facebook's recent additions have been extremely smart: allowing users to blog (finally) with Facebook Notes, and opening up to outside development with Facebook Developers. They've also helped users become more involved in politics with Facebook's Election 2006 and given away free iTunes music (see the Facebook-iTunes deal). There have been some missteps, too - like Facebook credit cards. I suspect these new additions might also be a miscalculation, but they can always provide an off switch if users feel their privacy is being invaded.
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