Facebook has confirmed a new privacy shake-up, letting users select exactly who gets to see the individual pieces of content you slap onto profile pages. The social networking giant has also announced plans for simplified privacy settings, dropping regional networks and making it easier to control the details you post.
All of these changes were announced in an open letter from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg also revealed that the number of Facebook users has risen to an incredible 350 million. That’s a lot of poking.
The new privacy overhaul will let you choose who can see the things you post to Facebook on a post-by-post basis, and as well as being useful for users, it also hints at another attempt by Facebook to compete with Twitter.
At present not many people share their posts with the web at large, but with the new option Facebook is hoping users will publish less personal posts to the public, creating real-time trends like Twitter.
The privacy changes will be explained in a walk-through that will be presented to users in the next couple of weeks. Facebookers will simply have to review and accept any changes.
Zuckerberg explained that the regional networks model had become a bit dated. He said: “Almost 50 percent of all Facebook users are members of regional networks, so this is an important issue for us. If we can build a better system, then more than 100 million people will have even more control of their information.”
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