On Sept. 5, millions of people logged onto Facebook.com and discovered a core philosophy that made the site an original place for college students to network had changed.

News Feed and Mini-Feed were introduced as the latest features to keep track of friends’ activities. Becoming friends with someone, writing on a friends wall and even ending a relationship can now be viewed as a “story” by all of your online friends.

Melissa Floyd, a sophomore in international business, said she has a Facebook and MySpace account and, up until the changes, she liked Facebook better.

“I use Facebook more often, but I guess I like MySpace more now that Facebook is more stalker-ish,” she said. “I had MySpace to get in touch with friends who weren’t in college. I liked Facebook because it was for friends in college and closed off to everyone else.”

Floyd said the new changes to Facebook are an invasion of privacy.

“You can see every move everybody makes and every click of the mouse. I don’t know one person that likes it. (Facebook) has definitely lost its originality,” she said.

Floyd is not alone.

Members who opposed the changes banned together last month and created groups opposing News Feed and Mini-Feed. About 750,000 Facebook members signed a petition for Facebook, objecting the changes just days after they were made.

“We did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them,” said Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, in a statement.

“I’d like to try to correct those errors now,” he said. “Somehow we missed this point with News Feed and Mini-Feed and we didn’t build in the proper privacy controls right away. This was a big mistake on our part, and I’m sorry for it.”

To provide a compromise to the new changes, Zuckerberg created a feature where a member can erase their News Feed, but, despite this, others in their network can still see their every move.

Mark Perlberg, a senior in history, said he does not think the changes made to Facebook are an invasion of privacy because the “stories” on News Feed and Mini-Feed can be deleted.

“If there’s anything you don’t want people to know they won’t find out,” he said.

Some students such as Edward Fetuah and Emily Desmond, however, did not notice the changes.

“I haven’t been on for the longest time,” said Fetuah, a senior in health and science. “I don’t see the point of it. You never know who you are really talking to and I just don’t see the relevance.” He said he would rather pick up his cell phone and call someone if he wants to talk.

“I had a Facebook account for two or three years but I let it lapse,” said Desmond, a nursing school graduate student.

She has not kept the account up to date since she graduated because she said it causes her to waste time and procrastinate.

But Perlberg said although he has mixed feelings about the site, he cannot imagine terminating his account.

“Facebook is weird. It’s like everybody competes to have these pictures with good-looking people. It reminds me of high school,” he said. “But I like to keep in touch with my friends from my hometown. There’s a lot of people I don’t really get to see. I think it’s going to be interesting to see what happens, like if I’ll still be in touch with people from my high school football team when I’m a grandpa.”