Facebook announced today in a public letter from founder Mark Zuckerberg that it would be removing regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where users can set content to be available to only their friends, friends of friends, or everyone.

In addition, Facebook will be tightening up its privacy features further by improving the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content you create or upload. The privacy settings page will be made simpler by combining some settings – something which has been requested by users for a while.

The move to remove “networks” will be welcomed by many – including me, as the ‘network community’ is no longer relevant due to the sheer size of some of these groups. For example, there are 5,047,460 people on Facebook who live within 50 miles of London. I prefer building my community around more niche interests (i.e. work, friends, family, etc.) rather than wide geographic catch-alls:

Facebook’s current privacy model revolves around “networks” — communities for your school, your company or your region. This worked well when Facebook was mostly used by students, since it made sense that a student might want to share content with their fellow students.

Over time people also asked us to add networks for companies and regions as well. Today we even have networks for some entire countries, like India and China.

You can read the full letter here.

To date, there have been 16,982 comments left on the blog in response to Zuckerberg’s announcement (and 24,805 Facebook ‘likes’).

Facebook's privacy statement as a word cloud