Facebooking

Mark Zuckerberg took the opportunity offered by his "60 Minutes" interview with Lesley Stahl the other night to roll out a new version of the Facebook profile page, with new features. For now, the new, reformatted version will remain optional.

The new profile page allows Facebook users to customize it more than they've been able to. Among the new features are a photo bar at the top to make it easier to show photographs to friends, a separate section showing mutual friends, and, for the first time ever, the ability to publicly arrange groups of friends based on family relations and the like and also arrange them based on whom you regard as your best friends, like on MySpace, rather than having them pop up at random.

The new changes make it easier to communicate with Facebook and find sites and topics that suit your interests. It also makes it easy for others - including advertisers - to find you, prompting more charges against invasions of privacy.

What do I think? I don't love the new Facebook profile format, but I don't hate it either. Having said that, I plan to stick with the old version for awhile, at least until the switch becomes mandatory. I'm not going to take the opportunity to prioritize my friends in any particular order; I don't want to offend anyone. Heck I have 222 of them! :-D On my late and unlamented MySpace page, I prioritized my list with people I knew in person, as opposed to those I only knew in cyberspace. The vast quantity of my Facebook friends - thrice the number of my final tally of 74 MySpace friends - and the way in which I interact with them render such prioritization obsolete.

As for privacy, I'm not worried. My mother did tell me to remove my year of birth from my public Facebook profile - not for reasons of vanity but because including the year in my date birth apparently makes it easier for people to gain information like my driver's license number or the like. So I did. Privacy concerns are no big deal; I have the privacy settings set to my satisfaction, and besides, if you're the type of person who's afraid of maintaining privacy on Facebook, you've probably included too much information about yourself anyway.

Facebook is expanding its capabilities so much, it's set to make the Internet one big social network. It may even render search engines like Google as well as e-mail obsolete. Unthinkable, yes, but so was the entire Facebook phenomenon only six years ago when it started as a network for college students, as well as Mark Zuckerberg's meteoric rise.

The last time someone in his mid-twenties had this much impact on the world, he was telling a reporter that the rock and roll band he belonged to was more popular than Jesus. Facebook isn't as popular, but 500 million users are nothing to sneeze at.