"You may have some posts you want to share with a wide audience," while at "other times you may have more personal updates," Okelola said. "If you have access to this beta version, every time you publish content into your stream you are able to control which people can access that specific piece of content."

Greater Flexibility

The beta trial works like this: Every time a user publishes content to personal pages, he or she is able to control which people can access that content. A drop-down menu makes privacy selections simple.

"After writing a status, uploading a photo, or creating other content from the Publisher, use the lock icon in the lower-right corner of the Publisher to access the drop-down menu," Okelola said.

The user can choose to make the post visible to whoever they wish. Alternately, users can restrict access to any piece of content to individual audiences such as friends and networks, friends and friends of friends, and friends only -- or even create a customized list of friends who have access.

"For example, you might be comfortable with anyone enjoying the video you took at a concert, but only want your family to see photos from your family vacation," Okelola said. "So you can choose to share the video with 'Everyone' while selecting 'Custom' for the photo album and choosing your Friend List for your family."

Battling Twitter

Facebook's trial is limited to users who previously "set their status updates and profile privacy settings to be visible to 'Everyone,'" Okelola observed. However, Facebook hopes to expand its new offering to more users in the near future, the company said in an e-mail.

"Because we're still in the testing phase, we are still collecting data right now to best determine what will be best for our users when we expand it to more people," said Facebook spokesperson Meredith Chin. "No matter what, users will always be able to control their privacy settings and make choices based on their own comfort levels."

Facebook's new publish-to-everyone capability repositions the social-networking site to better compete with Twitter, which has gained a widespread following because of the site's ability to post micro-blogs to a worldwide audience. However, the Facebook beta goes a step farther by giving users an easy way to control who can see posts.

Facebook's beta is merely the latest step the social-networking site has taken to keep up with its upstart competitor, noted Gartner Research Vice President Jeffrey Mann.

"First Facebook changed its user interface to adopt more Twitter-like activity streams," Mann said. "The second move came" earlier this year "when Facebook opened up their APIs to third parties."

"It's odd to see a powerhouse like Facebook scrambling to become more like Twitter, a relative upstart with no visible means of revenue," Mann added.