This article originally appeared on CampusProgress.org. It was the first article published anywhere on this controversy, which led more than 1 million Facebook members to register their disapproval.

It was a rainy morning in our nation’s capital. The Campus Progress staff was getting ready for the fall. It was only a matter of time before someone opened Facebook. We use it to communicate with a diverse and ever-growing cadre of young people. Our Facebook group, launched over the summer, already has more than 850 members, and many of us have personal accounts. But this morning we were shocked and awed by what we saw.

So-and-so is “no longer single.” Someone else removed “the Hubble Telescope” from their interests. Apparently, 10 of my friends “care about the End the Genocide in Darfur campaign issue.” For those who haven’t logged on, not to mention the poor souls who aren’t on Facebook, here’s what the networking site introduced just after midnight, California time, last night: The site now records the minutia of everyone’s moment-by-moment activities on Facebook, and aggregates them all to a handy “News Feed” page, and a “Mini-Feed” on every profile.

A Facebook profile now displays your online social exploits since mid- August. It notes when you wrote on someone’s wall, and when you commented on a photo, along with other new details such as your responses to event invitations, your new friends, and what groups you join. Before, as many of us know, you could write on a wall in relative privacy. It could be a sneaky affair. And commenting on someone else’s photo was something that few would notice. Wall and comment communications, while public, were not advertised.

Now, every time you do anything on Facebook, you issue a bulletin for all of your friends. Now no one will miss the fact that you think you look horrible in a picture, or that you didn’t accept an invitation to someone’s event, or that you wrote what you considered to be a funny item for your list of activities (“Trying not to incriminate myself on facebook to all my future employers”) and then thought better of it 10 minutes later and took it down.

Facebook said the changes were aimed at advancing the core mission of the site, which is to keep people abreast of their friends’ lives. “What we wanted to create is a news ticker, if you will, of the activity of people’s friends in their network,” Facebook’s director of marketing, Melanie Deitch, told CampusProgress.org.

Surprised by the new developments, some users have expressed reservations about the changes. On our blog this morning, I reacted in mock-horror, realizing that my wall posts were broadcast. (I promise I hadn’t actually done anything more controversial than accuse my friend of getting a pet Chinchilla.) Minutes later, a friend alerted me to the “facebook is now creepy” group someone had already started at Pomona College.

Deitch was careful to note that the new features don’t reveal anything new. Rather, they just make the information easier to find. “I think what it raises the awareness of for users is that, in the past I think they’ve felt like even though [some information] was public, that it wasn’t for some reason,” she said.

Indeed, a wall post or a photo comment used to be under the radar—a technically public but still quiet act akin to putting a note on someone’s dorm-room door. Only if someone happened to drop by their wall would they see it. Now, a wall post is more of a bulletin, a public declaration for all to see—something like nailing it to the door of the dining hall.

Some information can be automatically blocked from the feeds. Any restrictions a user applies in his or her privacy settings are honored in the feeds. A user who restricts access to group memberships won’t be exposed on their feed for joining the Progressives for Breakfast Cereal group on their local campus. And any feed item, or “story,” can be removed by simply clicking an “x” button on the profile page.

But somewhere out there, some guy was flirting behind his girlfriend’s back using wall posts or photo comments last week. And if he doesn’t log in before his girlfriend does, we may soon find out from their feed that they are “no longer in a relationship.”

If some users are perturbed, they can complain right to the source. Deitch said Facebook’s customer support team compiles regular reports for the staff on the feedback from their various changes. While she said she hadn’t heard enough to give an assessment about general response already, one friend of mine who raised her concerns got a swift response, which read in part, “We understand that some people are unhappy or concerned about the recent changes to Facebook. ... We think, however, that once you become familiar with the new layout and features, you will find these changes just as useful as past improvements such as Photos, Groups, and the Wall.”

Deitch said some negative response is normal. “Any big changes that we’ve done like this—you know change is hard for anyone,” she said. “But we tend to get some feedback that isn’t exactly glowing.” If response is too negative, however, history shows that Facebook might reverse the change, or at least allow users to opt out of the Feed feature or aspects of it. Some months ago, Deitch said, when Facebook changed the way friends are listed to omit network break-downs, negative user response led them to reverse the change.

Will Facebookers be too creeped out, or will we just move on, stalking, flirting, and procrastinating as usual? It’s too soon to tell. In the mean time, our flirtation will have to go under the social radar. It’s time to get poking!