Right. Here's my experience. While I obviously don't speak for everyone -- steveklabnik is an obvious example of someone who would disagree despite his seniority on the site -- I'd like to think I'm not the only one thinking along these lines.

I created my Facebook account in late 2005, in my first semester of university. (This was a couple of months after Facebook was first opened up to non-American schools, including ours. My user ID was #1714 in our network.) You might know the history. Only secondary and post-secondary students were allowed to register, and by default your profile was only visible to people in your school. I seem to recall allowing friendships between people in post-secondary and secondary networks was a big deal. There was no newsfeed and there was no API.

It was a very walled garden, but for better or for worse, it was walled reasonably tightly. Bugs were definitely there, but they were usually bugs, not deliberate action. At the time, Myspace was king, and Facebook was definitely presented as a less cluttered, more closed, more elitist, safer, cleaner version of that. You felt like what happened on Facebook would stay on Facebook, and people behaved accordingly. It's sort of like email -- you might realize that it's pretty trivial to eavesdrop, but few people who do realize that will write emails as if everyone could read them. It's more like a real conversation if you don't. There was no sense that whatever we put on Facebook would be public, now or in the future. This was a campus conversation: people might eavesdrop occasionally, but the walls don't have ears or eyes.

Then Facebook realized they want to make money and started to slowly turn up the heat on the frog cauldron. You've likely followed the story -- opening up to registration for everyone, loosening defaults, Beacon, applications, 'likes', instant personalization. All along, it started feeling a bit less like a dorm common area where you might chat with friends and more like the internet, where you have to watch what you say. Less like a BBS and more like a job application.

Should we have realized Facebook would eventually become what it is now? Probably, but we were eighteen and enthusiastic and idealistic and more than a little bit stupid. To be honest, I don't think even Zuckerberg knew in 2005 what he would do with Facebook in 2010, and we implicitly hoped it wouldn't change that much.

Now, I understand why Facebook is doing this. I mostly stay on top of the developments. I started gradually removing the personal of information from my profile a while back. (When signing up, I gave a fake birthday, left gender blank, etc. Still, there is room for feeling betrayed when you realize that no, you simply can't stop people from seeing your profile picture at 200 px wide. That doesn't leave a lot of room for optimism as to what will happen to walls and status updates in a year or two.) At this point, my profile is nothing I wouldn't want or care about the internet at large seeing -- and that's a lot less than it once was. The most recent thing to go were 'likes'; I don't like being described by foreign keys in a database, not to that degree. Call me picky.

I'm not even outraged. By now, I've come to expect Facebook to fuck up when implementing new things, to change defaults on me without notice, to open me up to the internet. I conduct myself accordingly. That's probably not the reaction they are hoping for.

Still, there is a sense of sadness. I care, because Facebook of yore was better for us. It didn't make money, but that doesn't change the end user experience. I miss having complete control of everything I trust Facebook with. I miss being able to put "post-beat-power-puff-dance-punk-youthloud-romantic-garage-pop extravaganza" as my favourite music without some dumb script trying to make sense of it. I miss the four whimsically named groups I belong to that were unceremoniously removed from my profile in a not-so-subtle attempt to get me to 'like' things instead. I miss being able to name my hometown as Trójmiasto, rather than having to name one of the cities belonging to the metropolitan area known by an informal name because Facebook wants a link to a database of all municipalities on earth. I miss what I once had.