Facebook on Tuesday announced at a press briefing held at its Palo Alto, California, headquarters that starting Wednesday it will be changing its privacy options and adding a new instant-messaging service effective in two weeks.

By reorganizing its privacy pages, the No. 2 social-networking site hopes to give users greater control over the information they choose to share.

According to Naomi Gleit, Facebook’s product manager for privacy, users will be able to move their less intimate friends to a “limited profile friend list,” restricting access to users’ most private pictures and information.

Another addition is the “Friends of Friends” privacy option that allows users to share information with people they are connected to through their friends. A system somewhat similar to LinkedIn profiles, with info visible only to first degree, or second degree contacts.

Facebook users have grumbled about privacy issues for some time. Changes became necessary because of the site's rapid growth and increasingly diverse user base, Sterling Market Intelligence analyst Greg Sterling said.

Facebook began four years ago as a service for American college students. At first a university e-mail address was necessary to register, but 67 million members later, two third of Facebook users live outside the United States–compared with just 10 percent 18 months ago.

Mr. Sterling said there is a balance between allowing visibility and increasing privacy.

“The purpose of Facebook is to be in touch with your network of friends and keep track of what they are doing and for this purpose you need visibility,” he said.

Analysts also suggested that these privacy changes had been prompted by the Beacon uproar–user’s revolt against Facebook’s advertising plan called Beacon–as a way for the company to win back a bit of its lost popularity.

Mr. Sterling doesn't expect these changes to affect the thousands of third-party developers building applications for Facebook’s platform.

“If a third party developer creates an application that is popular, it will spread across the networks like it did before from one friend to another.”

As for Facebook’s instant-messaging service announcement, it is only a natural progression for the communication already taking place on the site.