When hundreds of thousands of Facebook members revolted against the college social networking site's news feed last week, it was a sign Facebook's college core has strong feelings about how their social network should operate.

They may have more to protest.

Facebook has slowly been expanding its base beyond college campuses. Since Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook in 2004 with fellow Harvard students who wanted to keep in touch with each other, the site has expanded to high schools and, recently, to employees with email addresses from a select number of companies. Microsoft, which signed an advertising deal between Microsoft MSN and Facebook in August, is one.

TechCrunch reports Facebook will soon start allowing anyone to join directly into a geographic network in 530 geographic areas. Melanie Deitch, Facebook's director of marketing, told me today that the feature would be released sometime soon, "probably in the next month, but no firm date has been set," Michael Arrington writes.

News reports say Facebook will add more privacy options for users as it widens its audience. But stay tuned to see how Facebook's activist college faithful will respond to more changes.