• by Mark Walsh , March 16, 2009

As promised, Facebook has begun allowing users to open up all or part of their profiles for anyone to see. The move is part of the overhaul Facebook announced earlier this month intended to promote more and broader content sharing by individual users and companies.

A new "Everyone" option on the profile privacy settings page allows users to open to the public their entire profile or components such as status updates, links, Wall posts, personal information and photos or videos of themselves.

"One of the top priorities at Facebook is offering privacy controls that let you choose exactly what you share with whom. We have largely focused on enabling you to give access to your profile to people you confirmed as friends and people in your networks," wrote Mark Slee, a Facebook engineer, in a post on the company blog Monday.

It continued: "While these controls remain important and a priority for us, many of you have explained that you also want to open parts of your profile to a wider audience. Starting today, you can choose to make your profile and any of your content available to everyone on Facebook."

Profiles opened to everyone, however, will still not turn up in searches on Google or other outside search engines. Someone must be logged onto Facebook to view an open profile.

"In the past, searching for friends you haven't seen in a while or someone who has a common name may have been difficult. You may have only been able to see their search listing and a small thumbnail version of a photo, if that," wrote Slee. "With this change, people can use the 'Everyone' option and make it easier for you to find and connect to all the people you know."

Facebook has also redesigned the user home page and brand pages to allow wider and more frequent updates and content-sharing, partly to counter increased competition from instant-blogging service Twitter. Among the changes, marketer sites on Facebook now resemble user profiles, and fans receive updates from them in their news feeds as they would any other Facebook friend.