How to make your Facebook note visible to everyone?

[Update on Oct 1, 2010]

Facebook has changed a lot since March 2010. This post previously is no longer valid. In the past, Facebook Notes privacy setting possessed its own rules and settings which were different from other applications. Nowadays everything has been migrated. Notes acts like other applications and its privacy permission setting also follows the norms.

There are 4 categories in permissions: Everyone, Friends of Friends, Friends Only and Customize. The privacy permission is a lot of simpler. For example,

Setting permission to Everyone on a note means that this note is visible to everyone on Facebook, no matter if your wall is closed or the wall is visible only to yourself. However, if your personal profile is closed or only visible to certain people, the Facebook community may not see your note via your profile page unless they have your note URL, e.g. http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=[your_note_id].

Unlike the past, the default setting of Notes application has no additional control on permissions. It will be applied to a note when published only when you don't make any permission change individually.

There are two areas to control if your Facebook note is visible to everyone.

First, you have to open your application permission door to the Facebook public. This application permission acts like a gatekeeper to control who can get in the Notes door and see your notes. The default permission is Everyone. Each individual note can be associated or applied by different permissions as needed. The default is still Everyone. If you set your Notes application permission to something else other than Everyone, and then you set your individual note to Everyone, your note will not be visible to everyone on Facebook. For example, if you set the Notes application permission to Only Friends, and you set your note to Everyone, it means that only everyone of your friends will see that note. In other words, the permissions for both the application and the note itself must be set to Everyone in order to share that note with the Facebook public. The following table could provides you some illustration.

Notes Application Permission	Individual Note Permission	Who can see the note
Everyone	Everyone	Everyone on the Facebook this is the default.
Only Friends	Everyone	Everyone of your friends on Facebook

All combination permission sets are not shown in this table. There are only two examples as discussed.

For me, I set my Notes application permission to Everyone; then I use the individual note permission to control who can see my notes. Some notes will be shared with the entire Facebook community, some with my friends, some with certain people and some even only for myself. If you are sure that you won't share anything to the Facebook public, you can just simply to close the door by setting the application permission to something else other than Everyone. Then the unwanted guests won't be able to get into your Notes territory.

How and where to set the application permission settings

Here is one of the ways to do it.

• Navigate to your Notes page, and then at the top of the page (blue bar), mouse over Settings. you will see something similar as below.
  
• Select Notes Settings if it exists; otherwise, select Application Settings.
• If you select Application Settings, locate the application called Notes and then click on Edit Settings.

• Now you're at the application setting control box where you can change the permission.

Individual Note Permission

In each note, you should find something similar to the following at the bottom of the note when you compose it. Set or change the permission as needed.

One more thing, Setting Everyone permission to both the application and the note will not make it to be visible to non-Facebook users. All users have to log in onto Facebook in order to see your note.