Fred over at Unit Structures responded well to social-networking site, Facebook's addition of all-inclusive feeds. He is right to point out that "everything we do in public or semi-public spheres can be tracked and chronicled. We don't see our digital footprints as much because systems haven't cropped up to collect them, but collecting them is trivial." I've often written here about the archival nature of web-based social media and the creation of multiple tendrils of identity (akin to Fred's footprints), so I agree with him that this is nothing more than visually revealing a process that is already going on.

I think, however, that while many people (myself included) will be more than a little uneasy with these changes, that most users will take the change in stride. The very purpose of social networking sites revolves around social archivization and social classification, thus I would say that anything that enables these types of actions will only serve to grow the medium. Identities are modulated by ourselves and others in a performative manner, a Facebook user tagging a picture of his friend alters the subjects identity within the wider network in a public manner - and that it is public is the very point.

So now when these changes are made, an announcement goes out, the performance and the archive are extended, further adding to the interplay of classification that drives these networks. Currently many users navigate from page to page to keep up with their friends, or - in a demonstration that this is not as sudden a change as many seem to think - look at their "friends page" where recently altered profiles float to the top. This new change merely removes these extra steps by putting the data that the user is looking for in the first place onto their home page.

In the end, this is not a fundamentally altering feature to the service. It builds upon the basic operation of interaction in new media networks, creating a visual structure to common current usage.