350m users now on Facebook – Zuckerberg

Founder of the assuming most popular social networking site, the Facebook, Mr. Mark Zuckerberg has disclosed that over 350 million people globally now use the social networking tool, reports CHARLES OKOH.

Mr. Zuckerberg in an open letter on his Facebook’s wall, made available to Champion Infotel, said that 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,” he said. Zuckerberg noted that in order to make this possible, his team focused on giving subscribers to networking site the tools needed to share and control their information.

He traced the origin of Facebook to five year ago, when his team built tools that help people to control what they share with individuals and groups of people, just as the work to improve privacy has continued.

Facebook’s current privacy model, he said, revolves around ‘networks’ which entails communities for school, company or region, stressing that 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,” he asserted.

However, Zuckerberg pointed out that as Facebook has grown, some of these regional networks now have millions of members and concluded that this is no longer in the best interest of Facebook users.

According to him, almost 50 per cent of all Facebook users are members of regional networks, so this is an important issue.

“If we can build a better system, then more than 100 million people will have even more control of their information,” he said. He emphasized that they have plan to come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where Facebook user could set content to be available to only their friends, friends of their friends or even 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,” he asserted.
Additionally, his team would be fulfilling a request made by many of the users to make the privacy settings page simpler by combining some settings.

Since this update will remove regional networks and create some new settings, in the next couple of weeks, he stated the need to review and update user’s 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,” he said.

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