Oh this is great news! Anyone not in their set of schools/companies was being completely denied access. I hate it when sites do that. I’m a student too, in Asia. The Internet’s not about shutting certain groups of people out. Glad I can finally sign up.

Great! In Web 2.0, you have to be inclusive to become very successful. The best web apps will only get better when they are widely used.

The exclusivity was good while it lasted. I’m not planning on searching for alternatives though. Too stuck on Facebook. The UI just works for me.

If they start shifting towards looking more like MySpace and allowing widgets on top of widgets on profile pages, then I’m so gone.

being one of the hitherto uncategorised unwashed and unloved/unwanted masses i have just signed up - from 1st impression it seems to have a pretty nice interface - will need to spend some time when available to better understand its structure, USPs, etc … trouble is, this is kind of like password management scenarios from the 1990s (if you’re old enough to remember) and the rise of single-sign-on solutions to address the growing complexity …. we will all soon need a single-sign-on to all our social networking sites - now, there’s an idea …

Interesting news, will have to wait to see what this means…

Is anybody else having difficulty with registration? Have tried signing up for the past 10 minutes with no luck …. the ‘Security Check’ request keeps refreshing over and over again.

Any word on if the Yahoo buyout talks are persisting?

It will be interesting to see how Facebook competes and compares with MySpace, now that they are allowing open registration.

“will have to wait to see what this means…”

Problems for openBC/Xing, Linkedin and some other startups…

Now everyone gets sub-par features with a hint of social networking.

Seriously, it was better when all it was was a way to keep in contact with others. Haven’t we learned from MySpace that throwing in every feature and the kitchen sink doesn’t necessarily make a better website?

This just opens up Facebook to more fake accounts and spam accounts; Awesome!

Good News…as a college student, I don’t mind FB opening up to everyone, especially since Zuckerburg did the right thing this time and warned users and added new privacy settings. Kudos to Mark for this one. I don’t expect any spammers to bother me in my network, but we’ll see…

To me, Myspace is like the slums. Music everywhere, crazy art and colors, spammers, random people. If Myspace is the slums of the internet, Facebook is the high class suburbs. Each has its advantages, I guess.

Hopefully this will be a good move. Facebook is everything that Friendster wasn’t, neatly organized, fast, and to the point. The only thing it has been lacking for me was a broader appeal as a lot of my friends are long out of school. Although you can still sign up as an alum, I think most don’t want to go through the trouble.

Now lets just cross our fingers and hope all the myspace losers don’t start spamming the facebook universe.

Terrrible, terrible move. I understand the increased privacy controls, but in the old facebook, those weren’t a big deal and that’s a big part of the reason it was good. I could allow anyone from the Seattle network to see my profile and be relatively sure that they were either college students, college alumns, or people who worked for good companies. There was a sense of community even though you weren’t directly friends with these people.

Now I think that’s going to be gone, and that’s too bad. We’ll start getting facebook pages for Tom Selleck’s mustache and characters from Saved by the Bell - just like MySpace. Ugh.

facebook is so two months ago

I think that this is the beginning of the end. These communities need something to give them direction, and now that the whole college thing has been thrown out, a bunch of new people will come in, redefine the community as something more friendster like - eventually making the whole thing become meaningless. Seems like not the smartest acquisition to me…

Bad Idea. Facebook is ignoring what made them unique - providing an online social network to compliment a natural, geographically clustered social community (college students) - and morphing themselves into a generic MySpace competitor. They should spend their time better monetizing their existing user base, where they have ridiculously good user activity #’s, rather than chasing after MySpace in a who’s got the most users WW game.

Facebook should never have positioned themselves as direct MySpace competitors, at least outside of the college student space. Focus on what they do best, woo advertisers with incredibly deep targeting amongst a very desirable demographic, and make loads of cash. Don’t become Yet Another Social Network and go the way of Friendster.

I don’t know why people complain about Facebook opening itself up to everyone - the more open, the better! Plus, like Zuck said on NPR - it’s not like they’re changing their privacy rules.

I remember when facebook was first introduced at my University a few years ago, grades and productivity went way down for about 2 weeks… after that it seemed like a passing fad… hype is great!

Frankly, who new is this going to include?

Burger Flippers? The unemployed? High School dropouts? There aren’t many in that demographic trying to get onto Facebook or who even care about Facebook.

Tens of millions is going to be a gross exaggeration.

This is not that big a deal.

Albert that is hilarious but true!

could be bad…i’m thinking “access to college chicks” but i know all this does is make them leary…and the chicks make the place interesting…at least for the nerds.

Poke?

Bad move. Taking away what made Facebook unique. Goodbye Facebook =]

I’m sure that college students will revolt but in the end they will appreciate it because even if they are on the 6 year plan they all have to graduate sometime. =). I’m going to do a review on myspace vs. facebook on my blog soon as now the playing field is level finally.

this is the problem when VCs get into picture…they just look at the numbers…darn no growth…lets open up and show the growth to sell to some big guy…do not care losing community who made it famous in the first place

Are these people trying to screw this up? Seriously. The smart move would have been to own the college market worldwide, extend services (some for fees), and maybe consider a post graduate site.

This is a bad move. Every pond-scum sucking, bottom-feeding, porn-addicted, unemployed, spammer, low life, intoxicated, disease infested moron will crawl out of the woodwork hoping to get a glance of a college cheerleader.

Hey, I have a great idea for etsy - open the community up to everything made by machines without human intervention - that is so cool. It would augment their hand-crafted focus well.

as a college student, i held out on facebook for a long time. After joining, i was like “this is kind of cool” but as time went on the information flow, gossip levels , and social dependency on the application became greater. I cant keep up with it anymore, and opening to the public just means I have to manage privacy and probably more server problems and such. They wernt hurting where they were at. I dont see the need for this move at all.

This is a bad move. Every pond-scum sucking, bottom-feeding, porn-addicted, unemployed, spammer, low life, intoxicated, disease infested moron will crawl out of the woodwork hoping to get a glance of a college cheerleader.

As far as I’m concerned, this is a sign of the 21st Century. Face it, I enjoy seeing new faces, learning about them (while sitting on my ass). If you’re a fucking total dipshit, you’ll disregard this phenomenon. I, quite frankly, can’t. It’s a total, and obvious, pattern in modern society. People want to be recognized as INDIVIDUALS. Its only a matter of time before, and then, where technology catches up and recognizes this need. Long live Facebook (if only for the moment). Technology will reach its masses. I, for one, have been a huge Facebook fan. And whether or not it’s for the sole reason I’ve been designing a fantastic business plan for the future upon this……I’ll never know till I do it. But untiln then…………………………….?

And yes, total fucking alcoholic.

“This is a bad move. Every pond-scum sucking, bottom-feeding, porn-addicted, unemployed, spammer, low life, intoxicated, disease infested moron will crawl out of the woodwork hoping to get a glance of a college cheerleader. ”

Every alcoholic, spoon-fed, nose up in the air, cookie cutter, behind on loans, gossip queen, college enrolled moron is already on there. I don’t think it could get any worse then that.

anyone know how many people signed up yesterday for FBK accounts? That’d be interesting info

I worked on an early version of this as insider engineer at Facebook. Details are in my book at fbbook.com