• by Shankar Gupta , September 12, 2006

Facebook.com, which built its user base by creating a community for only college students, will soon open its gates to all Web users, the company said Monday.

The social networking site will create 500 regional U.S. networks, and will allow Web users not affiliated with schools to sign up for the site and join as a regional member, said a company spokeswoman. College students with a valid .edu e-mail address will still be in their own networks.

The widening of the network is the latest in a more gradual expansion of the site beyond its college roots. Last fall, the site created networks for high schools around the country--and in May, the site began creating networks for certain businesses, nonprofits, and governmental organizations. Each network requires an e-mail address from that organization to allow the user to access profiles of others in the network.

The changes were slated to roll out today, the spokeswoman said, but the company decided to delay after it faced user backlash against another change--the "news feeds," which continuously update members when their friends change their profiles. "The reason we wanted to push it back was to implement our lessons learned from last week," she said. "What we learned is we didn't do a good enough job communicating with our user base what we were launching." The company has not yet decided how it will announce the changes to users, she said.

Analyst Greg Sterling, principal of Sterling Marketing Intelligence, said that Facebook likely had no choice but to lose some of its exclusivity if it hoped to grow. "As a growth strategy it makes sense for them--they have forever had to figure out how to continue growing," he said. "It was kind of a limiting factor."

However, Sterling said, the change could remove some of the differentiation that it has enjoyed from its main competitor, MySpace.

But JupiterResearch analyst David Card said that even with a wider user base, Facebook remains significantly different from MySpace. "This isn't open like MySpace is," he said. "MySpace doesn't make use of any sort of X-degrees of separation trust network."

MySpace is also moving away from the social network model and more towards operating as a media portal, allowing users to share video and music. Facebook only allows users to share photos, but not other content.