First Posting

Hi everyone! My name is Joey Fight and welcome to my blog. I am a senior marketing and management major at the University of Delaware, and I am creating this blog as part of a class assignment for Information Technology Applications in Marketing. The theme of this blog is identifying internet users. I will be commenting on articles that focus on internet enterprises, consumer internet users, and what users are doing online. I hope you all find this blog informative and helpful in understanding more about users of the internet!

My first article was found in the New York Times and is entitled, "Facebook Feature Draws Privacy Concerns". Users of the popular high school and college website, Facebook, have been complaining about the recent changes the site has made to user’s homepages. Facebook, in an effort to save their users’ time perusing their friend’s profiles, began a news feed where each user’s homepage is automatically updated with changes in their friend’s personal profiles. This new feature does not reveal any new information that would otherwise be considered private, however it does inform people of the slightest changes to others profiles. Users are now complaining that information about themselves, which was once only available on their personal profile pages, is now appearing in a wider public setting for all to see. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, maintains that the intention of the news feed was to simply provide users with interesting information about their friends in a much more efficient fashion than before. However, he says that new privacy options are currently in the works and will be incorporated into Facebook for users who would like their information restricted to their profile. These new privacy options will include safeguards which will allow users to hide entire categories from the news feed feature; categories such as which online groups they belong to or classes they are currently taking.