I just logged into Facebook and was greeted by the following message:

Check out your Public Search Listing

Now people can search for this listing from Facebook’s Welcome page. In a few weeks, it may also be found through search engines like Google.

Now in a few months time I fully expect my Facebook profile to be the first or second returned page on a Google search result of my name. We’ve come a long way from Facebook’s closed college-only network huh?

It was almost exactly one year ago now (and I think it actually might be exactly one year ago to the day) that Facebook first started to make real headlines because users were so outraged with the data being shown in the new (at the time) main page feed. I, for one, liked the move and didn’t see what all the fuss was about (since the data was there anyway, just not as accessible) – a feeling which eventually spread to the rest of the community.

These days Facebook is all about making it easier for non-Facebook users to see into and use the network to a limited extent. The thought behind this no doubt being ‘if you give a mouse a cookie…’

Lets not overreact to this news though like we did one year ago. You can still set it so you won’t be able to be searched for publicly in your Search Privacy settings – and lets face it, if you don’t know what those are or how to use them by now, you probably shouldn’t be on Facebook.

Now how long until Facebook itself goes public (as in IPO)?