After facing backlash from many of 9.5 million users for recent additions to their Web site, facebook.com co-founders Mark Zuckerberg and Chris Hughes held an online press conference this afternoon.

Some 78 editors of college newspapers across the country, including the Daily Collegian, were given the opportunity to voice their opinions as well as ask about user reaction regarding the news feed and mini-feed features added last week. Here's what they asked:

Why do you think Facebook is so popular?

Zuckerberg: Everyone needs to know what's going on around them. It's a pretty core human need, and Facebook helps out with that.

Why news feed and mini-feed?

Zuckerberg: For a lot of reasons, the feed products make sense as the next evolution of Facebook. People generally use Facebook to get a sense of what's going on with the people around them and understand their world a little better. Up until last week, people had to browse around the site and read through people's profiles to get a sense of all this, but with these new products, we can surface a lot of that information for people. It makes using Facebook a lot more efficient for seeing what's going on around you.

How did the idea for the news feed develop?

Hughes: As Mark said above, it was a logical extension of what our users were already doing on the site. You log onto Facebook to see what's going on in the world around you. We wanted to improve Facebook to make that process easier. The nugget of an idea - surfacing the information about your friends that's most interesting to you - was refined over the course of months to produce what you see now. It's a ticker of what the people who are most important to you are doing in the day to day lives.

Some people feel that the news feed was too much. I understand you adjusted the privacy setting, but why offer so much info at all? Shouldn't privacy be offered before the information is released instead of after?

Zuckerberg: Some people have said they think the feeds are too much, but I think they just surface information that was already there in an easier way. Over the past week, we've received a lot of feedback from people that they learned things about their friends that they would have otherwise missed. And since their friends put that information up for them to see, that seems like a good thing to me. I do agree with you about the privacy settings, though. We messed that up. We definitely should have given more granular controls before launching anything. We're still working on fixing this. The other night we added the ability to remove mini-feed from your limited profile, for example. We'll probably add more as we have time.

Has there been a decline in membership since the news feed and mini-feed features have been added?

Hughes: No, not at all, we've actually seen an uptake in usage and new users.

Would you ever consider making removing the news feed and mini-feed from Facebook?

Hughes: The feed features are pretty integral to the development of the site, so we won't be removing them. The vast majority of our users aren't telling us they want them gone. Instead, people told us they wanted more control over them, so that's what we've looked to give them.

Do you think it's hypocritical of users to be angered by the news feed and mini-feed on a social networking site?

Zuckerberg: I don't think so. It just shows how important having control over their information is to people. We agree with this too. I think giving people complete control over what they share and who they share it with is important too, which is why we put such an emphasis on developing privacy tools and making sure Facebook users know about them.

How do you respond to people criticizing you for these changes, saying you're only doing it for the money?

Zuckerberg: Running a site that does this much traffic (literally hundreds of millions of pages each day) is expensive, so we need to make a bunch of money just to be able to pay for it. That's why we have ads on the site. But, as I'm sure you've noticed, we don't have many ads up there, and we make sure they're good ads. There's a lot more that we could do if we just cared about making money. Instead, we're really focused on building something great.

This is the first major backlash against Facebook. Do you guys believe you have handled it well from a PR standpoint?

Hughes: You're right to say this is the most significant outpouring of feedback that we've ever gotten from our users related to one feature addition. The "PR" as you call it isn't really what's important to us - it's how our users feel about the site. We're not thinking that much about how we're handling it "from a PR perspective," but rather how responsive we are being to the people that matter to us the most, our users.

You get negative feedback every time you change an aspect of Facebook, but you rarely backtrack. What was different about the response to the news feed and mini-feed? How big a role were the Facebook groups decrying the change in influencing your decision?

Hughes: We've never heard this much, this loudly. We realized pretty quickly that we messed up in our not offering essential privacy controls when we released the new features in the beginning. What our users were saying was absolutely reasonable, so we looked to act as quickly as possible to make the situation better.

Does this defeat or strengthen the original goal of Facebook?

Zuckerberg: In my opinion, it definitely strengthens it. Our goal is to help people understand what's going on around them, and these products definitely highlight a lot of those things. I think everyone realizes this surfaces more information. But what a lot of people don't realize is that this encourages people to share more too, since now whatever they share will be seen. So we have seen quite a significant jump in people using the site, looking at information and even posting new information to the site. So overall, despite the reaction, this has been a positive move for us.

Any regrets?

Hughes: We should have done a better job talking to our users about what these features were when we launched them. We also should have rolled out the necessary privacy controls when we shipped them. We messed up.

It seems that you want to open Facebook up to a wider range of members. How will this affect privacy from an employee/employer perspective?

Hughes: We are planning on opening up Facebook so that you don't have to be affiliated with a college, high school or place of business to get on. We're doing this because one of our top suggestions we get from our users is "make it so that my other friends can get on," but we want to do this in a way that preserves our users' privacy. Unless you're in a regional network on the site, you will notice no difference whatsoever to your Facebook. Only the people in your networks will be able to see your profiles, and even those can be limited with your privacy settings.

How is Facebook going to stay secure after it becomes opened up to anyone with an email address?

Hughes: Once you've made that choice [of a region], you can only change every couple months when you move. It's inflexible because we don't want users to jump around from region to region, but instead just choose the region that they actually live in.

How do you feel about employers checking out their employees' profiles? How about other people outside groups?

Hughes: It's not really about whether we're comfortable with it or not. It's up to our individual users [to post information and make it visible to employers]. If you want to only friend people in your college or you only want people in your college to see your information, that's still possible. Nothing is being forced on you.

What do you think of Facebook being compared to MySpace?

Hughes: MySpace and Facebook are really different when you think about it. Whereas they seem to be trying to be a media portal where you connect with a lot of people you don't know, we're aiming to be a social utility where you rebuild the real-life social networks that you already have.

What are you working on now?

Zuckerberg: Improving news feeds and mini-feed. There's a lot of work we can do to give people more control over what information goes into these, what types of information they want to see, how the information can be displayed better, etc. We always have a lot of work to do improving the site. I don't think we're running out [of things to do] anytime soon.

Would you mind explaining why Brody Ruckus [the creator of the group "If this group reaches 100,000 members my girlfriend will have a threesome"] was kicked off of Facebook?

Hughes: The profile and group weren't actually tied to a real user. Turns out it was a marketing ploy. Because of that, we took the group down for violating our terms of service. It wasn't because of the content itself.

What's with the quails?

Zuckerberg: We like quails. I think it's from Wedding Crashers. Good movie.

Is Rupert Murdoch [owner of MySpace] gunning for you?

Zuckerberg: He wishes :)

Finally, Mark Zuckerberg, why aren't we friends on Facebook? I requested you months ago, and you still haven't responded.

Zuckerberg: A lot of people have added me and it's tough for me to sort through them all. Maybe someday though...