How not to campaign against Facebook

Recently, Facebook has reinvented its layout. The new system, clearly designed to compete with Twitter, with live updates from friends, is unsurprisingly unpopular with long-time Facebook users. Sometimes, people get comfortable with things and they don't like it when it changes. Often, it's for fairly superficial reasons and their adverse response fades quickly. My personal opinion (for what it is) is that I'm impressed that a relatively big organisation has moved quickly to meet a market's demands. If MySpace, Faceparty or any of the others were so nifty, perhaps Facebook would have something to worry about.

So, lots and lots of people are currently taking time out from messaging their friends on Facebook to campaign about the "new Facebook". Where are they doing this? Yep, on (the new) Facebook. One "group" (groups are collectives you can join to support a cause, statement, petition or conceivably anything) is called Petition against the "new Facebook". It was easy to find using the new Facebook.... It currently has over 1.7 million members. Yes, 1.7 million people dislike the new layout of a social networking site so much, they're using one of its features to decry it. There's a certain dislogic to it (dislogic isn't a word, but illogicality is an ugly, ugly word) which may have escaped these protesters. But they're not alone. Another group, called People Against The New Facebook System has a further 260,000 members and then there's We Don't Like The New Facebook, with a paltry 210,000 members (these duplicative groups remind me of Monty Python's "People's Front of Judea" scene...).

Facebook is of course the winner in this changeover - there are over 2 million members across these groups, using Facebook's features more than most of the users who are ambivalent about the change. I'm aware that some people will have defected to MySpace et al, but while millions more either don't care or care enough to extend Facebook's many usages to rail against itself, this particular episode in Social Networking's history isn't likely to dent the huge presence that is Facebook.

I'm very bored of thinking and typing the word "Facebook" now, so that's all.