Facebook quietly changes 'Wall Photos' to 'Timeline Photos,' users react

Facebook has quietly changed the automatically created album "Wall Photos" on users' profiles to "Timeline Photos," sparking yet another round of indignation from Facebook fans at changes to the site.

Facebook has quietly changed the automatically created album 'Wall Photos' on users' profiles to 'Timeline Photos,' sparking yet another round of indignation from Facebook fans at changes to the site.

The automatically created album containing photos posted to users' Facebook profiles has had its name changed to 'Timeline Photos.'

Though the content of the albums has not changed, users of the social networking site are miffed at Facebook for rolling out another change without informing users. Irked Facebookers took to Twitter to express their feelings and pushed 'Timeline Photos' into seventh place in the top ten worldwide trending topics on Twitter on October 24.

User Martha Ryan tweeted, 'They changed the name of 'Wall Photos' to 'Timeline Photos'... this genuinely pisses me off,' Nailler's m e e ch tweeted 'Wall Photos to Timeline Photos. that's what fb can do omg what NO THANKS,' while Sam Navalt tweeted 'Facebook changed 'Wall Photos' album to 'Timeline Photos' wow ok.' Other users are less bent out of shape, including avrilsworld, who tweeted, '+facebook changed 'wall photos' to 'timeline photos'! -SO WHAT?!'

While the name change is, in reality, utterly inconsequential, it is another example of the constant grumbling by users that they are not informed of, or given the choice to opt out of, changes made to the social network. One of the most recent controversies surrounding this issue was the quiet roll-out of Facebook email addresses, replacing users' @domainname contact address with an @facebook.com address.

These changes are, according to a survey published by the American Consumer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) and Foresee, increasingly alienating users from the service. The results of the July 2012 survey by ACSI found that among the main causes for user dissatisfaction on Facebook were the switch to the 'Timeline' style display now seen across the site and concerns over increasingly complex privacy settings.

Despite these concerns, membership to the free service reached over one billion active monthly members early in October and the social network shows little sign of collapsing, despite share prices nose-diving after the initial, arguably over-inflated IPO and continuing to yo-yo far below IPO levels ever since.