At the beginning of the month, the founder of Facebook published a happy post about some upcoming changes to the site.  About a week later, the changes were rolled out.

What did they do?

Facebook users get more choices about who will see the content they put online.  Here are my current settings:

However, there are still some catches – third party applications have the ability to see all the users who you are currently friends with, and you can't do anything about it.

Facebook used to be way lamer

Until this change, Facebook wasn't (in my mind) a great place for me to put content on the internet.

When you're sharing information of any sort with other people, there are a few things you should take into account:

You don't always want everyone to know

Having trouble with the spouse?  Angry with your boss?  It's natural to look for a shoulder to cry on, but you really shouldn't be sharing those sorts of details with just anyone.

There are entire web sites devoted to making fun of people who posted private or embarrassing information for all their Facebook acquaintances to see.  If you're wise, you keep those sorts of things to yourself.

You might want EVERYONE to know

Maybe you added a hilarious caption to a picture of a cat – maybe you wrote an eloquent post exposing the truth about that one professor everybody likes.  There are some things that just need to be shared with the world, you know?

In the past, Facebook was not the place for such coolness – that witty status update would only ever be seen by people who knew you in some fashion.

Not everyone cares

My Facebook status updates are currently pulled straight from my Twitter feed.  I try to make posts that have some kernel of interest to people with similar interests to mine – even if they don't know me personally.

This results in a lot of status updates that are confusing or uninteresting to people who actually are my friends – my mother really doesn't care if I'm looking for someone to play L4D2 with (let alone know what it stands for).

In the interest of keeping my status feeds accessible, I also avoid posting things with a limited appeal.  I could announce every new band I discovered, but few people would actually care.

As an aside, I've noted that most Facebook users seem to have no concept of this – they post any update that occurs to them, regardless of how little I may care.  (The nerve of some people, right?)

Facebook finally reflects reality

If you're one of those responsible people who are conscious about your audience when you say things on the internet, Facebook is now a lot more attractive.  Now, everything you add on that site can be filtered based on whether or not you want certain people to see it.

Until now, these aforementioned responsible people have generally taken this content elsewhere – either to a public site, where people who are interested in your content voluntarily choose to follow it, or by taking their private conversations to email or private chats.

It's especially important that certain information be public

I don't personally care that my friend list is publicly available to anyone who writes an application that accesses Facebook – though on principle, I am annoyed that there is no option to keep that private.

I do understand why Facebook would want to make this sort of information available to outside sources, though.

Other people can do useful things with that information

Since it's popularity explosion, Twitter's web site has had a pretty small feature set.  You could make posts, pick people to follow, and access other people's posts and follow lists.  You could even pick some posts to be your favorite posts – but not a lot else.

But Twitter has become highly popular (particularly to the nerdy crowd), in part because:

• Almost all the information is public – very few people choose to make their profiles private
• All of that public information is easily accessible to anyone

Anyone can write a handy application or web site that does something cool with the information people put on Twitter.  You have access to things people have said, and the the things that they're interested in seeing.

If you're the sort of person who likes to derive a useful meaning from large quantities of information, Twitter is a dream come true.

I haven't looked into Facebook's API at all – I don't know how simple it is to access information as a programmer.  But as a developer, having access to more information instantly makes Facebook more attractive to me when I'm looking to write an application to analyze the differences between high school cliques and college cliques (or whatever).

Facebook wants to be the definitive social network – but for some time, Twitter has been the most attractive place to get social networking data from.  I can see why Facebook wants to draw the line where they have, and I don't blame them.