Would You Pay for Facebook?

Its been a long week for Facebook users, with all the privacy settings changed willy-nilly that allowed strangers to access your Wall, photos and profile information.

Everyone rushed to their Privacy page and reset their settings to "Friends Only" or "Friends of Friends" from "Everyone". The dust still hasn't settled, people are posting rants about leaving Facebook.

I won't leave Facebook, I've invested too much time into this free site, my lists of friends, my photos, my snappy one-liners, my fan pages, just about everything anyone should know about me is on Facebook.

Is that the plan?

My guess is that no one wants to leave Facebook, but will pay for more secure settings and privacy. I would. So is this whole brouhaha over Privacy settings just a smart Machiavellian move by Facebook for us to cough up a few dollars a year to own our information?

Or is it really just a dumb move?

The issue over ownership and privacy goes back to last February. Consumerist covered the change in the Terms of Service in this article.

But why the big change in Privacy? Most likely because of Twitter, which recently made an agreement with Bing to index tweets. Facebook could become more competitive with Twitter if users' information is public, taking out the need to use Twitter. With the new interface appearing more "Twitter-like", Facebook status updates may soon accomplish the same thing as a tweet. Good bye Privacy.

But I believe it is a move to charge you for using Facebook, want more Privacy? Pay for it. Or go to another site, go back to....MySpace. I believe people will pay to use Facebook because of the investment of their time and because there isn't another site out there that can compare.

How to reset your Privacy Settings:
This article is a helpful step by step guide on how to rollback your Privacy settings on Valleywag.

Coming up soon: OCD goes on the road again to Hong Kong, Cambodia and Vietnam. Reporting on local flora and fauna. Starting next week.