Just over a year ago Facebook was a ‘social club’ restricted to College students solely. It was rumoured to be in talks with Yahoo for an acquisition value of a mere $1-billion. Oh how things have changed. Since then we’ve seen Facebook open the ‘club doors’ to highschool students, select corporations, and then finally to the world at large.

They continued the ‘opening’ of the Facebook by releasing the Facebook platform, allowing anyone to create applications for Facebook. It even allows creators to display their own ads within the applications – making the business of writing Facebook applications a financially lucrative one. Could they really open up any more?

Apparently yes they can, as someone at Facebook accidentally revealed the PHP code behind their homepage – a cause for alarm as a mistake like that could lead to breaches in security. At this point one would think that Facebook would stop revealing itself, at least until their community felt 100% secure again. However, not shortly after they announced that they would be opening up their data feeds.

The latest attempt to open Facebook up is with the ‘Public Listing Search’. This allows anyone to visit the site and search Facebook for a specific person. Doing so could potentially reveal your name and you current profile picture. The privacy option to opt out exists as well. The real cause of concern comes from what is one month away, as Facebook plans to open the ‘Public Listing Search’ to search engine indexes – so change that risky profile picture now before Google caches it in their Image Search.

All of this ‘opening’ up has led to a healthy amount of growth (and privacy anxiety among members) with their latest estimated value pegged at $10-billion.