If it's true that any publicity -- even the bad kind -- is better than none at all, then Facebook might be onto something.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based social networking Web firm that once was geared exclusively towards college students announced this week that anyone with an e-mail address now is welcome. The move was aimed at expanding its scope in the, uh, face of rising competition but has run into a groundswell of online opposition.

Daniel Marsula, Post-Gazette

Broadening its reach, it seems, could be Facebook's saving grace -- or its death knell. It already has incited the furor of its youthful users after recently launching a feature that automatically notified their online buddies of changes to their profiles.

For example, if someone tweaked their profile after a breakup from "in a relationship" to "single," all of their Facebook buddies would get a message alerting them to the change. In turn, throngs of users (reportedly 600,000) revolted, accusing the company of practically giving the green light to cyber-stalking. In response, Facebook quickly offered tools for users to control the feature.

Still, the nearly 3-year-old company has been generating publicity, perhaps showing Yahoo! or other rumored buyers that it still has what it takes to go up against the likes of Myspace, whose reported 109 million users far outpaces Facebook's roughly 10 million.

But there are risks with Facebook's strategy.

Trying to become something it isn't could cause Facebook to lose everything, warned Don Dodge, director of Microsoft Corp.'s emerging business unit. Gunning for Myspace's 83 percent of the Web's social networking turf is risking the 7 percent that Facebook already has captured, he said.

"It's too bad because people believe Facebook is worth $1 billion and they risk damaging a $1 billion entity."

Facebook is better off focusing on the niche it knows well -- college kids -- and beefing up its advertising strategy to the click-per-ad model made famous by Google, Mr. Dodge believes.

"They have 90 percent of the college-age market and they haven't monetized it well," he said. "There's a lot more they can do."

Indeed, Facebook has strengths to bank on, industry watchers agree.

Facebook's design and user-friendliness could usher in a wave of nonstudent "pilgrims" who can spread the word about how easy it is to use, said San Francisco State University graduate student Susan Cline, who frequently muses about social networking sites on her blog. In fact, she thinks Facebook's two recent strategy "bombs" actually were clever business moves.

Ms. Cline, whose graduate studies meld computers and education, and her "socially curious" 20-something friends may no longer be college students, but they still are hungry for social networking sites that offer glimpses into the lives of old friends and potential dates. They'll likely switch to Facebook, she added, because MySpace is hard to navigate, works slowly and sometimes doesn't work at all.

Launched in 2004 as an online watering hole for high school and college students, Facebook quickly became popular among the teen social set who flocked to it as a sort-of online cruising site to check out friends or romantic interests.

While restricting the site to students and youth groups gave Facebook a cool aura of exclusivity, it also greatly limited the site's reach.

MySpace, the most popular social networking site open to the masses, allows anyone to sign up and in turn has lured in throngs of users and advertisers. In August alone, Nielsen/Net Ratings said MySpace counted 49.1 million unique visitors, vs. Facebook's 8.8 million.

But Ohio State University senior Sarah Call likes Facebook's virtual velvet rope -- that is, the exclusivity -- and isn't happy about the change.

With Facebook, Ms. Call, 21, doesn't get messages from older men and women she's never met asking to be her friend. That's not all that uncommon with MySpace, she said.

The English major worries that with more people logging on to Facebook, they might gain access to her profile -- despite the fact that she only allows the Ohio State network to take a peak at her.

"I have more information on Facebook because I was under the impression that it was more secure," she said.

Because future employers, landlords and graduate school officials increasingly are using social networking sites to learn things they might not get from an interview, Ms. Call said she and other friends at OSU are increasingly cautious. And now that employers could access her Facebook account, she said she'll be more conservative with the information there, too.

That could be another blow to Facebook, Mr. Dodge said, since it now has less to differentiate itself from Myspace or one of the new networking Web sites, such as Wis.dm and Microsoft's recently launched Wallop.

Mr. Dodge cautioned that Facebook could be taking a page from former hot spot Friendster, which he said became an also-ran because it failed to keep its eye on its prize audience.

"There's LinkedIn for professionals, Facebook for college kids and MySpace for teenagers," he said. "Who is Friendster's audience?"

It's too bad because people believe Facebook is worth $1 billion and they risk damaging a $1 billion entity.