[X]PRESSONLINE

Story by Logan Triglia

Facebook has opened its figurative doors to the rest of the Internet.

The social networking site, formerly open only to those with an educational (.edu) e-mail address, is now allowing anyone with a ‘verified’ e-mail address to register and use the site.

There was quite an uproar at the beginning of this semester when Facebook launched their Big Brother-esque news feed. The feature greeted users at each login with a bullet-pointed play-by-play of what their friends were up to.

If Jamie accepted Casey as a friend, I knew!

If Jenna left a message for Taryn about their weekend plans, I knew!

Students started a formal petition to Mark Zuckerberg, the 22-year-old creator of Facebook, who responded with an open letter of apology and explanation and added more diligent privacy features.

While some believe that Facebook’s latest expansion is the result of a potential sale to Yahoo! for a reported $1 billion, others think that Facebook is just doing what it must to keep up with its biggest rival, MySpace.com.

Zuckerberg will not comment, only revealing that he has ‘spoken to different companies about different things.’

It’s clear that students enjoy the voyeuristic tendencies of cyber-networking. But it’s also clear that they don’t want others to know who they’re watching. Failure of the MySpace profile tracker anyone?

Facebook groups formed by SF State students such as, ‘I’m Afraid to go on Facebook because EVERYONE WILL KNOW,’ and ‘Do not invite people to Facebook!’ have more than 240 students collectively. Just to keep it in perspective, another SF State group with nearly 100 members is ‘SFSU students STREAKING on FIRST RAIN.’

So there you have it; SF State students taking their privacy very seriously while simultaneously not taking it seriously at all.

Something students may be overlooking is the fact that despite the expansion, Facebook still only allows those in your network (in our case SF State) to view your profile.

And there’s always those handy privacy features.