Facebook is currently the largest and most popular social media network, growing by hundreds of thousands of users per day. And unlike the slowly-dying social community of MySpace, part of Facebook’s appeal is that a user’s pictures, information and updates are only visible to the user’s network and friends.

However, the recently popular social network, Twitter, poses a real threat by making updates completely public with real-time, searchable news. To deal with the Twitter threat, Facebook announced last week that it will be changing its privacy settings so that members have the option for posts to be visible to everyone or visible only to a certain group. While these changes give users more control over their privacy, those who do not use them will find that their updates are automatically viewable to everyone because the Facebook privacy setting will be public by default. Subsequently, Facebook will update you when someone becomes your “fan”, meaning that they follow your personal profile without being your Facebook friend.

Is this the right direction for Facebook? Just as the “friend-feed” caused major backlash, these changes will surely be met with strong opposition. The “friend-feed” has now been accepted, though, and is one of the most popular aspects of Facebook. Will this be the same case for the new public default privacy setting? Share your comments with us here.