Facebook today announced it was opening up the Facebook Application Directory as well as the applications’ “about” pages. Now who’re not the existing Facebook users can view these applications organized by recently popular, most activity, most active users and newest. Not only to this extent, those who are not Facebook user can access to the discussion board, and view the comments made on the applications. In particular, the first name and profile picture of the users that made the comments and the first name of the developers that developed the applications will be shown accordingly.

Is this an act of further invasion of user privacy following the announced of Facebook’s user profiles are available to everyone in last month. No doubt, information and user interaction is important to many, but my sense is that it just too few people that are willingly want to involve in this Facebook’s new experiment if they’ve the choice. I wonder those users who concerned of the privacy issues of this new setting will turn their profiles from public into private. Nevertheless, I believed Facebook has built security into their user setting before opening up the user profiles or application directory to avoid a negative business impact or putting their user data at risk. They definitely know if they can’t satisfy their users, their users will flee faster than they acquire a new user on the Web.