14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook is still growing at a huge pace, not that it's surprising anyone at this point. The company's cofounder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote an open letter, or rather blog post, to Facebook users to talk about the privacy changes which are about to become a reality after being announced several months ago but also to make a quick note on the fact that Facebook is now at 350 million users.
The social network managed to add 50 million users in about two and a half months. That's the size of a decent-sized social network in its own rights, further proof, if it was even necessary, that Facebook is in a league of its own. What's even more interesting is that it went from 300 million to 350 million slower than it grew from 250 million to 300 million, perhaps a sign that it may finally be slowing down. It's still got some ways to go though. When you add the fact that Facebook started out the year with 150 million users in total, it's clear that it's doing something right.
However, its size is becoming a problem in certain areas and Facebook has to make some changes to features that can't really scale to a service with hundreds of millions of users. “Facebook's current privacy model revolves around "networks" — communities for your school, your company or your region. This worked well when Facebook was mostly used by students, since it made sense that a student might want to share content with their fellow students,” Zuckerberg explains.
“Over time people also asked us to add networks for companies and regions as well. Today we even have networks for some entire countries, like India and China. However, as Facebook has grown, some of these regional networks now have millions of members and we've concluded that this is no longer the best way for you to control your privacy,” he added.
So Facebook will remove the feature, which it says is used by almost half of its users, altogether as part of the privacy options revamp which should be rolled out very soon. The changes have been known for months now, a good thing considering the number of users they will affect. The new model will allow users to share their content and info with either their friends, friends of friends and everyone. The idea is to make the options simple and clear so that users know exactly what they're sharing and with who. The privacy control page will also be simplified and some options removed or merged to make them easier to manage. Because this is such a big change Facebook will notify its users of the changes and guide them in choosing the options that suits them. The changes will be coming in the next couple of weeks.