• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, September 7, 2006

Social networking site Facebook clearly wants to be seen as a major industry player.

The company recently forged a deal with Microsoft for contextual ads, similar to the recent $900 million Google-MySpace agreement. Facebook also sold a small piece of itself to ad holding company IPG. Reportedly, the founders believe the site's worth $2 billion, at least according to a Business Week article earlier this year.

But the dollar figures being bandied about seem to have gone to the company's head. This week, in a move that shows how alienated Facebook's owners are from the consumers it relies on for content, the site made a significant change without first informing users, triggering complaints and protests by hundreds of thousands of the site's members.

Facebook Tuesday added an RSS "news" feed that informs members of differences in their friends' pages, like new photos added to their pages or groups joined. The information itself could have been viewed by members before the new RSS feed, but required their active participation: users had to actually visit their friends' page and then put two and two together to figure out what had changed. Now, the company is doing that work and broadcasting it to users' friends--highlighting the very information that users assumed would seep out more gradually.

By this morning, somewhere around 500,000 of Facebook's 9 million users were peeved enough to petition the company to do away with the new feature.

So far, Facebook has refused to do so. Founder Mark Zuckerberg Tuesday night wrote a blog post that suggests he thinks the protesters are reacting irrationally. "Nothing you do is being broadcast," he wrote. "Rather, it is being shared with people who care about what you do--your friends."

But this attitude ignores the reality of how members actually use the sites. Obviously, many users feel that quietly adding a new friend's picture to a profile is different from announcing that they've added that picture.

The move also likely jolted users because it showed just how little control they have over the site--even though the site itself depends on users to create content. Now, as users petition to abolish the new RSS features, Facebook executives may well realize that a site that depends on consumers to create as well as consume content will have to also give users a voice in how the site is run.