Facebook greeted its 9 million registered users Tuesday with the “Facebook Facelift,” as deemed by the Web site.

The social connection Web site added two new features to its site: a News Feed, which appears on the users’ homepages, and Mini-Feed, which appears in each person’s profile.

“This is a major product announcement for Facebook and the first time News Feed technology will be used in social networking,” Brandee Barker, corporate communications of Facebook, said. “In addition, we expect News Feed and Mini-Feed to be hugely popular with Facebook users.”

According to Barker, these features were created according to the requests of Facebook users.

“News Feed and Mini-Feed are a different way of looking at the news about your friends, but they do not give out any information that wasn’t already visible,” Ruchi Sanghvi, product manager for Feed, said in a Facebook Blog.

News Feed appears on each user’s homepage as a constantly updating list of news stories about their friends. It is a collection of a user’s social network, which includes the friends and people in their network.

News Feed highlights relevant information about people and activities they have been involved in and items of interest to a user. It keeps the user updated on their friends’ activities on Facebook, from the second someone posts a message on a wall or joins a new group to the minute when someone’s relationship status changes.

It is personalized to one user and is only viewable by that user.

Mini-Feed is similar to News Feed except that it tracks the activity of one person. On each person’s profile page, Mini-Feed will display a list of that user’s activity on Facebook and is viewable by that person’s friends and others, based on that user’s privacy settings.

On the contrary

Student Facebook users on campus said they were overwhelmed by the constantly updated news lists about their friends.

“When I got on Facebook this afternoon, I was taken back by the ridiculousness of the News Feed. It is dumb and I think that it will dramatically decrease in the number of users,” Brandon Spence, a freshman in parks, recreation and tourism management, said.

Julia Howie, a freshman in First Year College, agrees.

In a message to the Facebook team and customer support, Howie wrote, “Please change Facebook back to the original version. The new News Feed layout is just ‘stalkerish’ and creepy. I don’t care about who wrote on whose wall or who joined what group. If someone honestly cares about that, then they can go and look it up themselves. Please change it back to the original version, I don’t like it.”

Birthday reminders have also been omitted from the new design.

“Facebook was the only way I could remember people’s birthdays, and thanks to the new Facebook, I will forget everyone’s birthdays,” Spence said. “In a nutshell, the new Facebook has lost my respect, and I fully intend to write to the creators of Facebook to let them know of my profile withdrawal.”

Brooke Powell, a sophomore in business management, said she “Facebook stalks” on a daily basis and is pleased with the new additions.

“The new Facebook is great for me, but I really do not want people seeing every detail of my activities when they sign on,” Powell said.

Facebook launched in February 2004, and the Web site now has over 9 million registered users across more than 40,000 regional, work, college and high school networks. According to comScore Networks, Facebook is the seventh-most trafficked site on the web and is the number one photo-sharing site.

“These features are not only different from anything we’ve had on Facebook before, but they’re quite unlike anything you can find on the Web. We hope these changes help you stay more up to date on your friends’ lives,” Sanghvi said.