Time will prove you right or wrong, but I believe that people will in general adapt to the way the web changes. I think it's a challenge to educate users so that you can have a featureful app without causing them harm, but I don't think it's impossible. The web populace has grown vastly more informed in just the last five years- why should we decide they won't be able to grasp this extra control?
Facebook is ambitious; it wants to be a lot of things. It wants to continue to be the service where you talk only to your friends, but it also wants to be other things. We believe we can do other things as well as we've done friend-only social networking. That may be a misjudgement, we'll find out.
Re: The other settings that became publicly available- I think it was a call they made, balancing what is good for the network and what is reasonable for the individual on a social networking site. Some of it had to do with what privacy was feasible to enforce (given that you had to have Search on the site, and different levels of indexing etc), and I don't necessarily know all the details here.
The primary goal was to /simplify/ privacy settings, and make it more fine-grained, which they've clearly done.
The other settings that became publicly available- I think it was a call they made, balancing what is good for the network and what is reasonable for the individual on a social networking site.
Who your friends are and what groups you are a member of is potentially consequential information. This was the fatal flaw in Livejournal's privacy system. Sure you could make your journal entries friends-only but your profile - your friends list, your interests, your groups and your profile pictures - were always public. If you were involved in anything that you maybe didn't want your current/future employer/cow-orkers (say) to know about, the ONLY safeguard was to keep your username a secret. Well on Facebook, you're supposed to use your real name...
Facebook is ambitious; it wants to be a lot of things. It wants to continue to be the service where you talk only to your friends, but it also wants to be other things. We believe we can do other things as well as we've done friend-only social networking. That may be a misjudgement, we'll find out.
Re: your friend list: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=197943902130
Re: The other settings that became publicly available- I think it was a call they made, balancing what is good for the network and what is reasonable for the individual on a social networking site. Some of it had to do with what privacy was feasible to enforce (given that you had to have Search on the site, and different levels of indexing etc), and I don't necessarily know all the details here.
The primary goal was to /simplify/ privacy settings, and make it more fine-grained, which they've clearly done.