Facebook Drops the College Wall, Opens Sign-Ups to Everyone

Facebook, the social network founded two and a half years ago in a Harvard dorm room and limited until now to users with a valid college email address, opened its sign-up page Tuesday to anyone with any working email address. Mark Zuckerberg, the company's 22-year-old chief executive, announced the change on the company's official blog earlier this week and the registration form went live for the general public around 9 a.m. Pacific time.

The move ends a tiered rollout that has steadily expanded Facebook's eligible audience over the past two and a half years. The site originally required a Harvard.edu email; expanded to Stanford, Columbia and Yale in early 2004; reached 800 American colleges by mid-2005; opened to high school students in September 2005; and added work networks for a list of Fortune 500 employers earlier this year. Tuesday's opening removes the email-domain wall entirely. Anyone, of any age, with any email address, can now create an account.

The news arrives less than a month after Facebook introduced the News Feed, the redesigned home page that surfaces friends' activity in a single scrolling list. The News Feed launch drew immediate user backlash and a Facebook-hosted protest group reached more than 700,000 members within days. Zuckerberg posted an apology and added new privacy controls. The early data inside the company, however, has shown that average time spent on the site has gone up since the change.

The public sign-up flips Facebook into more direct competition with MySpace, the News Corp-owned social network that has dominated the U.S. social-media market for the past two years. MySpace remains the larger service by registered users. Facebook executives have argued in recent interviews that the cleaner, real-name-based approach the site has used inside its college and high school networks will translate to a wider audience now that the wall has come down.

For high school seniors who have been using Facebook through its school-network expansion, Tuesday's change means parents, younger siblings, employers and out-of-school friends can now request to join their friend list. Privacy controls released last week let users limit who sees individual profile sections, posted photos and tagged photos. The company has not announced an upper limit on user growth, and the registration page is now live worldwide.