This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2011, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Change is hard, and a few tweaks here and there to Facebook have apparently gotten a lot of its users in an uproar.
The popular online social network, which boasts 750 million subscribers, has created a ticker feed of friends' posts in the upper right-hand corner that automatically prioritizes the more important posts on the top. The site also has redesigned its news feed to include top stories as determined by Facebook.
"Now, News Feed will act more like your own personal newspaper," the company wrote in its blog. "You won't have to worry about missing important stuff. All your news will be in a single stream with the most interesting stories featured at the top."
These new features follow recent cosmetic changes to Facebook, including a floating menu/search bar that now stays on the top of the screen, and a new "Subscribe" button.
The reaction from users who commented on The Salt Lake Tribune 's Facebook page was swift.
"If I told you how I really feel it would be so profane you couldn't use it," posted Maureen Aisling Duffy-Boose.
Joanne Brattain posted that she's "not happy. ... I'd like to choose what I read, not have them decide for me!"
"They really, really suck," David Jay Crispin said in a post. "This is another example of improving something until it is unusable."
The negative response was so quick, hackers already have created an extension for Google's Chrome browser that takes the new ticker off your Facebook page. Speaking of Google, the search engine — as if to take advantage of all that Facebook backlash — was trying to draw people's attention to its new social networking service called Google+. On Google's homepage, a big blue arrow points to the entry point to Google+.
But if you think Facebook's new changes are drastic, just wait. The Palo Alto, Calif., company reportedly is working on a major design overhaul of its site and service to coincide with the possible introduction of a new music service to compete with the likes of iTunes and Spotify.
Twitter: @ohmytech
Google+: +Vincent Horiuchi