Noah Kagan points us to a friend of his, Devin Ream, who's blogged some recent changes at Facebook, which simplify the way users can control their privacy settings:

I hated this page because it was like, 2047 check boxes with 32 different radio buttons to select. But now it's narrowed our privacy settings down to 'Normal', 'Reserved', 'paranoid' or a custom mixture of options.

I haven't used this. But, I like they way that they have simplified this setting. I am also very impressed with the pace of innovation at facebook. It seems that they must have built a scalable platform from the beginning - which allows them to focus on enhancements - as opposed to rewriting what is already there. Friendster, of course, wasn't so lucky, and has arguably met its demise because it was unable to innovate because of scalability issues. Myspace is going through a similar rewrite, as its platform has proven quite unscalable too. Any user of myspace has encountered lots of error messages.