Facebook prepares to offer content to all

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 2 Jul 2009 at 09:11

Facebook has rejigged its privacy controls once again, as it gears up to offer members the ability to post their content to everybody on the internet.

The company has admitted that its privacy controls are currently "too complex" as they are scattered across numerous pages and behind various menus.

To address this, the social-networking site will consolidate all privacy functions onto one page with five levels of access available. The broadest, dubbed "everyone" will ultimately allow anybody to view content posted on that profile, whether they're members or not.

The move is a blatant push to cash in on the popularity of Twitter, and builds on the live wall updates recently introduced by Facebook. There's no word yet on when the company will launch the "everyone" service, and the site says it is still considering how deeply search engines will be able to index user content.

"The test we're launching today will include a small fraction of the total number of people on Facebook," notes Facebook chief privacy officer Chris Kelly on a blog posting.

"Over the next few weeks, we'll be collecting direct feedback from the testing group and using it to make improvements to the tool. Our goal is to ensure that people understand the changes to our privacy settings and make choices that reflect their comfort level. After the testing and feedback phase is complete, we expect to offer final versions of the tool and the new settings to everyone on Facebook."

Beneath the "everyone" privacy category, the company is also introducing "Friends and Networks", which offers profile access to all your friends and anyone on listed networks. There's also the self explanatory "Friends of Friends", "only Friends" and "Custom" categories. The latter allows users to manually hand-pick people to share with.

Facebook will also continue to "give people the power to limit who should receive any particular piece of information they want to share". This means members can set different privacy settings for individual pieces of content, such as photographs, status updates and video links.