

In response to this dissatisfaction, creator Mark Zuckerberg issued an apology for the site's failure to include appropriate customizable privacy features. This tracking is often casually referred to as "Facebook-Stalking". Others were concerned that the News Feed made it too easy for other people to track activities like changes in relationship status, events, and conversations with other users. Many users complained that the News Feed was too cluttered with excess information. Initially, the addition of the News Feed caused some discontent among Facebook users. In response to users' criticism, Facebook later updated the News Feed to allow users to view recent stories first. In 2011, Facebook updated the News Feed to show top stories and most recent stories in one feed, and the option to highlight stories to make them top stories, as well as to un-highlight stories. Unlike in the News Feed, the user can delete events from the Mini Feed after they appear so that they are no longer visible to profile visitors.

An integral part of the News Feed interface is the Mini Feed, a news stream on the user's profile page that shows updates about that user. News Feed also shows conversations taking place between the walls of a user's friends. This has enabled spammers and other users to manipulate these features by creating illegitimate events or posting fake birthdays to attract attention to their profile or cause. News Feed highlights information that includes profile changes, upcoming events, and birthdays, among other updates. The new layout, by contrast, created an alternative home page in which users saw a constantly updated list of their friends' Facebook activity. Originally, when users logged into Facebook, they were presented with a customizable version of their own profile. On September 6, 2006, Ruchi Sanghvi announced a new home page feature called News Feed. Using a secret method (initially known as EdgeRank), Facebook selects a handful of updates to actually show users every time they visit their feed, out of an average of 1500 updates they can potentially receive. The news feed is the primary system through which users are exposed to content posted on the network.
