I'm not sure what is more terrifying: The prospect of formerly private information being exposed to the ravages of cyberspace or the fact that Mr. Manjoo is so blithe about it. I leave it to him to fend off the stalkers, spooks, marketers, and thieves. My information will remain private.

Farhad--

This may be a good option for you, as an adult, clearly very familiar with the dangers of personal info on the web, but considering that Facebook started as a networking site for students, I think it's not a positive turn of events. Students don't necessarily realize what they are opening themselves up to by posting information on Facebook, and don't necessarily think about who can access their info. Mostly, students think of this as a way to connect with fellow students or friends on other campuses and don't think about strangers finding out about them. As someone who works with college students, I am definitely not happy about this latest opening of info to an even larger group of web users.

Salon.com considered something similar on May 22, 2006 but reversed itself after receiving overwhelmingly negative feedback within its user community - including a flurry of user name changes, mass post deletions, and movement of some threads to the Members Only lounge.

Check the TT Central thread entitled "Searchability: TT and Google?" for people's responses to Salon.com's proposed experiment.

FOr those of you who weren't in "the shit", the Google option was considered for TableTalk.

for me to delete my facebook page.

Fine go ahead and delete it your facebook profile. If you don't wanna be there, we don't want you there either. More space and bandwidth for the rest of us.

Seriously is it really rocket science? Does it really need to be said(again)?

You write something(anything) online, you just entered the Wild West, where anything goes. That's the beauty and danger of the Internet. The risks and rewards are yours for the taking.

Facebook makes it quite easy to hide information from non-friends, and a quick tour of facebook will show you that a lot of people don't allow non-friends to see anything at all except their name. Facebook even allows users to hide certain information from specific friends through the "limited profile" setting.

It's a lot of checkboxes to go through, but if one is concerned about stupid drunken frat party pictures, he can uncheck the "photos" box and hide them.

That's not what worries me about this change, though. I'm concerned that I'll be getting a ton of message spam from people writing scripts that google common names and fill out the "send a message to this user" form. Facebook is almost entirely free from spam, and I fear this may be the end of that. That's why I'm turning this feature off.

Yes, it's a great white pages for someone named "Farhad Manjoo". All one of them on Facebook. Less good for someone named "Matthew Miller" -- I can't even tell you how many of us there are with Facebook accounts right now, because the search engine times out before returning results.

If you've got a common name and want people to be able to find you, better hope you're distinctive-enough looking to be clearly identified by a thumbnail-sized photograph in the middle of 500 others, because that's all you're gonna get. Facebook doesn't let you customize this "listing" at all.