Update | 7:18 p.m. Included more information and comments about the privacy changes.
Facebook’s biggest strength is also its Achilles’ heel: Just about everyone you know is on the social networking site, and more likely than not, those people are your Facebook “friends.”
That can be a good thing — you can easily share all of your messages, photos and videos with everyone in your network. But it can also be a headache to assign people to different groups and slog through the Web site’s 40-some privacy control settings to parse who gets to see what.
And if you want to post a status update reminding guests about a surprise party for your best friend — but prevent the birthday girl from seeing it — good luck figuring out how to do that.
All of that is about to change, Facebook said Wednesday. The company will be overhauling its privacy controls to make it easier for users can share as much — or as little — as they want with whomever they choose.
Although Facebook provided few details, users would even be able to share updates and other personal data with the general public, much like Twitter.
“Facebook’s mission is to give people to power to share and make the world more open and connected,” said Chris Kelly, chief privacy officer for the company, in a conference call with reporters Wednesday. “We want people to be able to share with as narrow or as broad of an audience as they choose.”
The new features use the same privacy settings already in place on Facebook, but rather than apply them universally across the profile of a user, they can be applied to each bit of uploaded content.
“What we want to do is encourage people to make a decision about each piece of content they publish,” said Leah Pearlman, product manager at Facebook, in a phone interview.
To usher in the new settings, the company said it plans to release “transition tools” that will help members tinker with their privacy settings on a single, organized page.
The new controls will come as something of a relief to many Facebook users struggling to straddle the line between sharing personal and private content on the Web, said Charlene Li, founder of digital strategy firm Altimeter Group.
“I have a wide mix of friends on Facebook and have never felt comfortable sharing everything I do with all of them,” she said in an e-mail exchange. “So I’m looking forward to having a ‘girlfriend’ feed where I can dish with my close girlfriends, but also use Facebook to broadcast to everyone, even outside of Facebook.”
Ms. Li also pointed out that the changes could give Facebook a better edge over Twitter as a real-time messaging system because users would have more than two options for publishing updates.
“This does present a very interesting alternative to Twitter,” she said. “In many ways, it trumps what Twitter does because there are two levels at which someone can use Facebook — a ‘public’ one versus multiple layers of ‘private’ feeds.”
As our sister blog, Gadgetwise, discussed last week, some users have been beta-testing the new controls.
For the moment, the features are only available to 40,000 Facebook members in the United States. Next week, the test pool will expand to 80,000. Once the service is out of beta, the various settings will be accessible from a drop-down menu next to the status update and photo upload boxes.
The company did not say when the controls would be rolled out to all users.
Comments are no longer being accepted.