More than 350 million people around the world are using Facebook now
 

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An Open Letter from Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg

It has been a great year for making the world more open and connected. Thanks to your help, more than 350 million people around the world are using Facebook to share their lives online.

To make this possible, we have focused on giving you the tools you need to share and control your information. Starting with the very first version of Facebook five years ago, we've built tools that help you control what you share with which individuals and groups of people. Our work to improve privacy continues today.

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.

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. 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.

The plan we've come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone.

We're adding something that many of you have asked for ? the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content you create or upload. In addition, we'll also be fulfilling a request made by many of you to make the privacy settings page simpler by combining some settings. If you want to read more about this, we began discussing this plan back in July.

Since this update will remove regional networks and create some new settings, in the next couple of weeks we'll ask you to review and update your privacy settings. You'll see a message that will explain the changes and take you to a page where you can update your settings. When you're finished, we'll show you a confirmation page so you can make sure you chose the right settings for you. As always, once you're done you'll still be able to change your settings whenever you want.

We've worked hard to build controls that we think will be better for you, but we also understand that everyone's needs are different. We'll suggest settings for you based on your current level of privacy, but the best way for you to find the right settings is to read through all your options and customize them for yourself. I encourage you to do this and consider who you're sharing with online.

Thanks for being a part of making Facebook what it is today, and for helping to make the world more open and connected.


Mark Zuckerberg

Incredible usage, incredible traffic volumes (#2 on Alexa and the growth chart continues to reflect an upward trend).

They obviously have had much criticism recently what with numerous privacy issues and serious crime and this has clearly prompted these changes with their new gate closing model however many experts seem to think that this set-up is the total opposite of what made Facebook what it is.

those are amazing numbers nonetheless

With all the families using it, at least its still a very clean place.

Their advertising costs for banners & links must be pretty high. I wonder how much they make on their ad sales?

:pimp:pimp

That's one way to make the 'rents proud. "Hai mah n pah...dont no if u no this but dat syte i startd 5 years ago...well its goten popular, lik #2 in wurld n stuf."

Was using it for a year, now I am over it.

Business wise I think it would be better to just let visitors view everything (ads) instead of making everyone sign it and become a member. :2 cents:

fuck that guy is so loaded now..