"This move transforms Facebook from being a social network to being quasi-White Pages of the Web," said IT expert Om Malik.
Facebook is in fact aiming to get in early in the race to build a global - and potentially lucrative - online directory containing as many personal details as possible, such as one's CV, contact details, hobbies, and even friends.
Currently 200,000 people sign up to Facebook every day and it now has 42 million users, according to the site. Newspaper reports say that it aims to have 60 million members by the end of the year.
In the three years since it was created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerbeg, who was then a student at Havard, Facebook has burst into the global consciousness, becoming a kind of vast private online directory. But its moves to take its members' profiles public means that they could be found by anyone using common Internet search engines.
Unless a Facebook user actively opts out of the scheme, their picture and name will from now on be available to non-registered Websurfers.
"One of the great features of Facebook was privacy. You could be assured that what was in Facebook remained in Facebook. However, that illusion might be ending soon," said Malik.
Several other sites are already positioning themselves in this market for a global online directory, such as Spock.com, which has indexed more than 100 million people and says that it is "building the broadest and deepest people specific search engine."
The automatic site trawls public Web sites to collect, index, and display information that it finds online about individuals.
And its success has translated into raising billions of dollars from investors in past months, while other companies are now hungrily eyeing up the site.
On Wednesday the Wall Street Journal reported that Microsoft was mulling an investment of up to 5 percent in Facebook, at a price that would make the site already worth some $10 billion.
The paper said that Microsoft had been in contact with Facebook Incorporated over the past few weeks, adding that a 5 percent stake could be valued at between $300 million and $500 million.
But sources also told the WSJ that Google had expressed "strong interest" in a possible Facebook investment, and a company showdown could be on the cards.
Facebook is not alone in its aims to set up an online directory.
PeekYou says that it has some 50.3 million names on its index, while Wink boasts some 217 million, mostly culled from such popular social networking sites as MySpace, Linkedin, and Friendster.
Upscoop, created by the company Rapleaf, has indexed millions of profiles, and will go through your online contact list for free to see which sites your friends are using, as long as you provide the password to your e-mail address.
The main aim of all these sites is to attract advertising, with made to measure ads for each Web user.
Listing its members on Google will enable Facebook to attract millions of new Web browsers, which is likely to swell its advertising revenues and boost its worth ahead of an eventual public listing on the stock market.
Facebook directors have already said that they hope to raise some $10 billion when they go public.
"Facebook company is easily worth much more than $1 billion already," said financial analyst Cody Willard. "They've likely turned down offers of about $7 billion or $8 billion."
Other personal search sites have more controversial uses.
Rapleaf runs what it calls "an online reputation lookup" where it says that users can "look someone up by their e-mail address to view their reputation related information, profile stats, and social networks."
Typing in someone's e-mail address could give you instant access to the sites that they frequent, as well as an online rating about their reliability.
The aim is to give an online assessment of people, for example those using the Internet for online shopping and trading, modeled on the system already used by the eBay auction site, or to assess potential employees.
© 2007 Agence France-Presse
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