Earlier this week Facebook unveiled its News Feed feature, which publishes updates to you about all your friends' public Facebook doings. Some of the updates are rather mundane, like “Geoff Harcourt removed LA Confidential from his favorite movies". Whooptie doo, right? Others are more exciting, like “Ryan Hughes and Ian Amelkin are no longer friends", “Matt Starr added Flavor of Love to his favorite TV shows", or a notice about newly posted photos of your friends getting crazy in New Orleans.

The point is that it’s a stream of updates from all of your friends’ public doings on Facebook. That has, for some reason, upset hundreds of thousands of Facebook users. These masses have joined Facebook groups that lash out against Facebook and encourage people to shut down their Facebook accounts. News outlets quickly picked up the story; even Time did.

On a side note, does anybody else see the inherent hypocrisy (and hilarity therein) of people using Facebook to talk about how much Facebook sucks?

That aside, I can’t understand the backlash against the News Feed. Granted, Facebook should have incorporated privacy settings for users’ feeds, which they since have. Even still, the feeds published only the things you publicly do on Facebook – things that people could easily find out about anyway. I think the nay sayers are under some kind of delusion that leaving comments on others’ walls while inebriated is private, or that nobody would be able to read on their profile that they joined a Facebook group for swingers, etc.

All the News Feed is doing is taking all these things and presenting them in a neat way to a user’s friends – people who could read about it anyway. If you take a step back and think about it, it’s a pretty robust tool that’s really just another step toward more fully digitizing our lives.

Like it or not, it’s a forceful trend. People now live or die by email, must have their Blackberries at all times, write blogs on their happenings, and keep profiles on Facebook or Myspace to keep in touch. The News Feed is simply a new way to digitally interact with people.

Some people find the digitalization convenient and fun. Others abhor digitalization of real world interactions because of its inherent superficiality. The same people who shudder at the phrase, “Did you read about that on my blog?" are in for more of the same with the News Feed. Can you already hear someone say, “I broke up with Jim last week. Didn’t you see it on News Feed?" I can.

Like News Feed or hate it for this reason. Don’t hate it because it invades your privacy – you’re the one who put out information about yourself in the first place.