Facebook announced yesterday, via the Facebook Blog, that they are now allowing anyone to join their social networking scene.
We started at one school, and realized over and over again that this site was useful to everyone—not just to Harvard students, not just to college students, not just to students, not just to former students.
This includes your friends who graduated pre-Facebook (yes, there was such a time), your friends who don’t have school or work email addresses, and your friends whose schools don’t give out email addresses.
This doesn’t mean that anyone can see your profile, however. Your profile is just as closed off as it ever was. Our network structure is not going away. College and work networks still require an authenticated email address to join. Only people in your networks and confirmed friends can see your profile.
If you’re uncomfortable with regional users being able to see you on Facebook, you can always change your privacy settings to prevent people from finding you in searches and communicating with you. Also, we’ve built out a bunch of tools that will help verify new users and prevent spammers from bothering you.
Some of Facebook’s new features include The Facebook Friend Game and My Notes (login required for both features). The Friend Game is a trivia game that randomly selects your friends and asks you questions driven by information from their profiles. The My Notes feature has an option that allows you to import notes (posts) from an external blog. My Facebook friends can now view posts from EricStoller.com on their My Notes page.
Facebook is expanding and I think it will be interesting to see how students react to an “open” Facebook. The privacy features are an important part of Facebook and time will tell if this new version, I’ll call it Facebook 2.0, will be as successful as the original semi-featureless version.