Facebook.com was a website known for its exclusivity among major universities across the United States.  To verify identities, an e-mail domain name checking system was implemented to deny users with a false identity.  If the e-mail domain check test was passed, the user would be able to move on to the next registration step.

Facebook.com took their website to the next step by accepting additional funds to expand services.  Facebook now currently boasts over 7.5 million registered accounts with a rate of an average of 20,000 users signing up on a daily basis.  The expansion included the adding of smaller universities and colleges domestic and international, high schools, and small-to-large sized companies and government agencies.

Facebook recently received negative press by releasing a feature, dubbed Mini- and News-Feed that placed headlines of updates from fellow Facebook friends directly on the log-in homepage.  These updates included the changing of your and your Facebook friends’ relationship status in personal profiles, the addition of Facebook friends, the updating of Facebook Notes (blog entries) and also what pictures your Facebook friends had commented on and what pictures they added in Facebook’s photo album feature.  Shortly after receiving the bad press, the company implemented a privatization feature for its Mini- and News-Feed features.  This occurred within one month ago.

Another potentially controversial feature arriving through the Facebook pipeline will be the allowing of anyone to register and create an account for the service.  Facebook director of marketing, Melanie Deitch has announced that the feature will be introduced “probably in the next month, but no firm date has been set.”

Although there is not any further information as to how Facebook would alleviate privacy concerns, this feature definitely will raise the same concerns that the large social network company, MySpace is notorious for: preventing online predators.