One of the most anticipated days in the history of social networking site Facebook has finally come: the company announced today that it has begun making status messages, photos and videos visible to the public at large by default instead of being visible only to a user’s approved friends.

Private by default has been a hallmark characteristic of Facebook, as high on the list as the lack of MySpace garishness. It’s been key in making Facebook the biggest social network on earth. Now that’s about to change. Facebook has been very careful to avoid the major backlash that it has seen in the past when making substantial changes to things like privacy settings, but it’s hard to imagine there isn’t going to be a backlash. From a web innovation perspective, the move could lead to some of the most exciting developments we’ve seen yet from the world of social media.

Remember the News Feed?

When Facebook launched its News Feed feature in September 2006, displaying all activity by a user’s friends in a flowing list of updates on the page, the backlash shook the young service to its core. The News Feed is now the central feature of the Facebook user experience. The new public visibility of shared messages is going to change Facebook on that kind of scale. Read more…

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