Facebook Trims the Fat off Beacon

Written by Nicole Ferraro

Friday, November 30. 2007 at 02:00 PM EST 2 comments

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In addition to Facebook and Slicethepie's magical powers to morph all music lovers into talent scouts, here's what's been going down over on the social networking scene: Facebook is serving up Beacon with a side order of fairness, sorta; ABC and Facebook announce their candidacy for the presidency, or something; and MySpace has a really new, innovative idea nobody's ever heard of called "news feeds."

Facebook trims Beacon's fat: While I made fun of MoveOn's anti-Beacon petition last week, and still stand by my statement that the petition was just a ploy to lure in site viewers, it seems that the uprising has led to the revamping of Beacon. According to the New York Times, Facebook declared last night that it would alter the system so no updates were sent out without explicit user approval. The decision came after 50,000 site users signed the MoveOn petition and after Facebook was officially deemed the Anti-Christ. While this is triumphant news for Facebook users, Facebook will unfortunately no longer be starring in the production of "The Grinch Social Networking Site Who Stole Christmas."

Facebook and ABC News do the political thing: Facebook, teaming with ABC News, has launched a U.S. Politics application with which users can receive up to date coverage on the 2008 campaign and essentially "follow" ABC reporters on the trail. Users can pick a candidate to support and leave messages of hope on his/her Facebook wall. For example, "Dear Sen. Mike Gravel, I'm sorry the Democrats don't invite you to the debates anymore. I hope they hire you at Baskin Robbins. XOXO." Also with this application, users can choose specific ABC reporters to "follow," and no you can't switch out your ABC reporter for Anderson Cooper.

MySpace to add new feature... News feeds! Remember when Facebook first added its newsfeed feature and everyone went insane with rage and started jumping off buildings and engaging in cannibalism? Well, what luck! According to Peter Levinsohn, Fox Interactive Media president, MySpace will be adding Facebook-style news feeds (ah, notice the *space*) within the next 30-45 days. The same announcement talks of MySpace's plans to allow users to create three different profiles: one for family, friends, and work. Life would be so much easier if we were all just born with MPD.