If you’ve been watching Facebook over the years, you know that it’s not the same place it once was. First a haven for college kids with a .edu address, Facebook expanded its community in both directions. Upward to accommodate the working world (a Facebook network can be your place of business) and downward to the high school world (verified through some mysterious process that’s much easier when you have a school mailbox). Today, Facebook morphs once again, this time making it more apparent than ever that you’re talking ONLY to the people you want in your circle of friends.

Over the past few months, Facebook has conducted social experiments with how information gets shared within networks on the site. Its newsfeeds broadcast any tiny change you make to your profile to your network and an open API lets any third parties easily develop applications to work within Facebook. Other recent social experiments that did not go over too well include one that broadcast your shopping purchases to your network.

Today, Facebook introduced some new privacy measures that offer more control over who you share information with, and, for now at least, access to the enhanced privacy feature is prominently located on your home profile page. I just took a look and found the new choices powerful and fairly easy to use.

The big problem is getting kids (and adults) to use them. Some of the controls now let you exclude certain people from getting your photos and updates (this means that Dad can be your friend on Facebook but doesn’t necessarily have to be privy to everything that you post.) The new features make it easy to block certain individuals from being able to even search for your name on Facebook (which can keep kids safer or can let them hide a bit more, depending on whether you entertain an optimist’s view). The level of nuance and granularity in the settings is remarkable. You can decide who can share your photos, tag them, and send them to others, and then make the same decisions for your profile information, your applications, and your newsfeeds.

Bottom line: It appears that the new features let you control precisely who sees what on your profile. Kudos to Facebook for dishing out the controls. Now it’s up to us to make sure that we use them.