Student favorite suffers growing pains

By Ravi Agrawal for CNN

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(CNN) -- Married? Engaged? Just friends? Or single? As with most relationships, Yahoo's $1 billion courting of one of the most popular social networking sites online is probably a bit more complicated than that.

If you haven't picked up Facebook's lingo yet, you're probably not a high school or college student, and have missed out on news feeds, mini feeds, walls, photo-tagging, and of course, hours of online stalking that has come to define a generation of an exclusive community of online procrastinators.

But that's all about to change. Facebook the online social networking site started in 2004 by then Harvard College student Mark Zuckerberg began as a sort of yearbook for Harvard students, quickly expanding to other universities and even high schools around the world.

After news last week that Yahoo! Inc. was in talks with Facebook to purchase the site in a deal worth $1bn, the previously restricted site this week opened up its membership to anyone, anywhere.

But while Facebook's young and trendy targeted user demographic is an instant marketing dream, its demographic could now change -- and many of its members aren't too happy about recent developments.

Brian Parr, a student at Northwestern University, created a Facebook group for students who were against "News Feeds," a new feature that provided members news about changes in their friends' profiles, and the group promptly clocked up over 600,000 members.

Their petition to increase privacy controls on the site led to Zuckerberg writing a much publicised open-letter to the facebook community in which he admitted "we messed this one up," and announced new options for users to not be a part of the news feeds.

However in an updated note, Parr says the group has received many requests to launch a similar protest against the site's public expansion.

"This group and its creator have received many requests to take up the fight against Facebook going public," he wrote. "We will continue to advocate improved privacy features, and if privacy is compromised, this group will renew its fight."

Already, hundreds of new groups have been created to protest the site's expansion, some of them reaching thousands of members.

One of them, "students against Facebook going public" had almost 7,000 members at last count, with members posting messages like "prepare for 'everyone and their grandma' is on Facebook" and "Facebook will [now] actually be more dangerous for kids and attractive to predators than MySpace."

But some of Facebook's older users say they have seen enough expansion already to not be too worried about opening the floodgates to public membership.

Jim Fingal, a music analyst at MediaUnbound and amongst the first few Facebook users as a Harvard student, created a group for students who were "frankly, pretty apathetic" about the controversial news feeds as a reaction to groups like Parr's.

"I've been a member for a long time, used to use the Web site pretty much on a daily basis, and didn't think [the news feeds and site expansion] was that earth-shattering an event," said Fingal.

"I think the purpose of the site is joining people together, but it's possible someone who joined six months ago would think its some sort of cool exclusive club. So there's a difference between the opinions of people on the ground and those of the people responsible for steering it in a certain direction."

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Facebook started life as a networking site for Harvard students.

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