TC: “Don’t be fooled by what appears to be a minor change in the user interface. This is another indication of Facebook’s extreme desire to get users to make as much of their data public as possible. Just like Twitter.”

RWW: “The Day Facebook Changed Forever: Messages to Become Public By Default (UPDATED) … After we wrote this post, Facebook HQ emailed to tell us that the first wave of users who get this feature will have their messages made public by default because their profiles were already marked as public, but that when they open the feature up to subsequent users – those users will have default privacy settings that match their pre-existing profile privacy settings. Unfortunately, in our tests so far (see our screencast) – we haven’t been able to successfully change our default message settings back to friends-only, it stays stuck on public. When we switch our test account from profile public to profile private and then back again, the default for message posting gets stuck at ‘friends of friends!’ … In time, though, people may very well decide they are comfortable with their social networking being public by default. That will be a different world, and today will have been one of the most important days in that new world’s unfolding.“