Thursday, Oct. 29, 2009

N.C. kid takes control of Facebook revolt

CHARLOTTE -- Move over Mark Zuckerberg. A younger social media whiz kid is moving your own fans against you. And, oh yeah, he looks just like you, too.

Nearly 1.5 million Facebook users, angry about changes the social networking site made Friday, have joined a group that is one of the fastest-growing phenomena on the Web.

Who's in charge of the group? A middle-schooler from Apex, N.C., who wears his baseball cap backwards and likes to play Farmville on Facebook. Jonathan Woodlief, 14, is the administrator of CHANGE FACEBOOK BACK TO NORMAL!!, which on Tuesday night was booming at a rate of more than 100 new members a minute. That's the kind of viral sensation that rooms full of marketers scheme to create.

Maybe innocence helps a cause. Jonathan added a note to the side of the group that reads:

Lets try and get 10,000,000 people to join! :)

He might get there. He also posted a group link on the Facebook suggestions page and is considering pushing forward a petition.

A woman in Nebraska who joined the group seemed to realize the youth of its leader and wrote on the group's wall, "THIS ISN'T A FACEBOOK ADMIN PAGE, THIS IS A KID!!!" But she was drowned out by thousands of other posters who didn't seem to mind at all that the group leadership is an eighth-grader.

Jonathan did not start the group but joined it a day after it was started because he disliked the changes Facebook made. He noticed that the creator of the group, someone he didn't know, had quit. Believing in the cause - and perhaps sensing an opportunity - "I just pushed a button to make myself the admin, and that was it," he says. (Smart kid.) Now he's the leader of one of the fastest-growing things online. "I get a lot of friend requests from people I don't know," he laments.

Reached by phone Tuesday night, Jonathan's parents were surprised to learn he was the leader of a booming online movement. "We had no idea," said Jonathan's father, David.

Why did he take leadership of the group? He dislikes the new News Feed layout, in which Facebook has sorted what users see, deciding which friends and posts are most "important." And the new Live Feed, which includes all kinds of information, he finds overwhelming. Like many users, Jonathan just wants Facebook to bring back the old set-up.

"The other one was a good balance," he says. "The new one is just noise."

Facebook is notoriously resistant to user protests of change, which have happened before. But this one is growing fast.

And, after all, Facebook was started by another curly-headed young man with a vision of gathering people together online. There is just a little resemblance between Zuckerberg and Jonathan.