Sept. 7 (Bloomberg) -- Facebook, the college friend-finder Web site that competes with News Corp.'s MySpace.com, is encountering rising opposition from its members to new features that track changes made to profile pages.

The number of members who have joined ``Students Against Facebook News Feed'' more than doubled to 600,000 within one day. The group was created Sept. 5 to protest tools that automatically alert a member's contacts to any alterations made to their personal Facebook site, such as adding pictures.

The protest group, created by Ben Parr at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, is asking Facebook to take down the new tools or let users deactivate them. The uproar prompted Mark Zuckerberg, who created Facebook while at Harvard University, to post a note on Sept. 5 telling users that the closely held company is ``listening to all your suggestions about how to improve the product.''

``The debate is still ongoing,'' said Graham Webster, associate editor at CampusProgress.org, an online magazine published by the Washington-based think tank Center for American Progress. ``It is increasing the awareness among students about what they are posting online.''

The new features also spurred hundreds of postings from bloggers elsewhere on the Internet, some of them calling for a boycott of Palo Alto, California-based Facebook.

Protest Planned

Igor Hiller, a 17-year-old member, said he is organizing a protest Monday Sept. 11 at the Facebook headquarters to demand the company remove the tools.

``People are protesting on the Internet, but I want to take it to the next level,'' Hiller, who starts at the University of California, Santa Barbara, this year. ``I don't like this sort of Big Brother sense that everything you do is watched and recorded.''

The controversy shows how fast opposition can snowball on the Internet. Facebook has gained popularity among college students since its creation in 2004. It recently added online social networks for workers and has more than 9 million users. Last month, Microsoft Corp., the world's largest software company, signed an agreement to show sponsored links and graphical display ads on Facebook.

Hiller said he registered at Facebook soon as he was admitted to the university and isn't visiting the MySpace site, which has more than 100 million users, as often.

Personal Pages

``MySpace is more creepy and stalking,'' Hiller said. ``If people are getting disgruntled, they will go elsewhere.''

Facebook lets users create personalized Web pages with pictures and information about themselves, join social groups and communicate with friends in their networks.

The features, added Sept. 5, don't disclose information that wasn't previously available. Rather, they alert members of a group about what others have been doing online since last time they logged into the service.

The ``Mini-Feed'' updates users' profiles with changes they've made, such as sending notes or adding pictures, and the ``News Feed'' flags what other people in a group of friends have been doing while on the site.

Single, Available

For instance, when a user edits his status to ``single'' from ``in a relationship,'' a headline shows up in his profile telling everyone he's available again.

``We know that many of you are not immediate fans, and have found them overwhelming and cluttered,'' Zuckerberg said in his posting. ``It's brand new and still evolving.''

He said privacy options for Facebook remain the same. Users can change settings on their sites so that non-friends aren't able to see what they post.

The ability to track users' activities on Web sites has raised privacy concerns. AOL Chief Technology Officer Maureen Govern quit last month, two weeks after the company mistakenly published information about its users' search activities on the Web.

To contact the reporter on this story: Cecile Daurat in New York at cdaurat@bloomberg.net;

Last Updated: September 7, 2006 18:04 EDT