• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, September 8, 2006

Well, that was fast. Thursday night, two days after Facebook sparked an immediate and unprecedented user backlash with the introduction of RSS feeds, company executives came to their senses and said they would modify the new feature to give users more control over the feeds.

The RSS feeds unveiled Tuesday alerted members' friends to changes in their profiles. The problem is that users had always made changes in the past and then waited for the information to gradually seep out as others visited their pages. They didn't expect that changes would immediately be flagged and broadcast as news events in themselves.

By Wednesday, at least 500,000 of the sites' roughly 9 million users--mainly college students and recent grads--signed a petition demanding that Facebook eliminate the RSS feeds. One group of protesters had planned a boycott for next Tuesday.

Other users went even further; USA Today reported that students who own the college and law school online discussion board AutoAdmit.com by Wednesday had created a program to abolish the feeds.

Facebook execs seemed as stunned by the negative user reaction as site members were by the new features. The execs thought the RSS feeds were such a good idea that they introduced them without conducting a beta test, seeking user input or otherwise asking the members for their opinion.

But users of social networking sites will make their opinions known--whether anyone asks them or not. And Facebook owners, now working to develop code that will allow members to determine what information is included in the feeds, seemed to have listened.

In a blog entry time-stamped 2:48 a.m. this morning, company founder Mark Zuckerberg apologized in an "open letter" to users. "We really messed this one up," Zuckerberg wrote. "[W]e did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them."

No argument there.