The big Facebook Everyone, Friends of Friends, Only Friends privacy change is now being rolled-out. First, there was the message from Facebook at the top of the homepage. Now, there’s a prompt immediately at login.

This conspicuously coincides with Google’s recent roll-out of real-time search results (on select keywords), and the associated “partnership” with Facebook. In order for real-time updates from Facebook to get out into the general search ecosystem, they need to be set to “Everyone”.

This privacy change makes all Facebook users reevaluate their privacy settings (and the restrictive defaults), giving “Everyone” a chance. The default restrictive settings were great for getting Facebook going, but also made a huge opening for Twitter, which has no such restrictions, and therefore participates in a much larger ecosystem (general search).

So you see, a privacy setting of “Everyone” is actually required for your status updates to go out into the real-time Twitter-like stream that Google is creating. I expect that this privacy policy change is just as much about giving Facebook users, via status updates, a chance of being first-class citizens in the inane prattlestream.