In an open letter to users that appeared on the site Wednesday morning, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said the social networking site has outgrown the usefulness of regional networks.

With roughly 350 millions users, Facebook is enhancing its privacy controls and eliminating its regional framework for online communities.

When Facebook launched in early 2004 as an online network for college students to stay connected, the model centered on sharing information with “networks” of school friends. Over time, the network expanded to companies and regions as well.

Almost 50 percent of all Facebook users are members of regional networks, with some regions encompassing entire countries, such as India and China.

“As Facebook has grown, some of these regional networks now have millions of members and we’ve concluded that this is no longer the best way for you to control your privacy,” Zuckerberg said.

“We are adding something that many of you have asked for – the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content you create of upload. In addition, we will also be fulfilling a request made by many of you to make the privacy-settings page simpler by combining some settings,” he said.

“The plan we’ve come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of our friends, or everyone.”

In the letter, Facebook’s users will be asked to review and update their privacy settings. A message on the site will explain the changes and take users to the page where they can update the settings, Zuckerberg said.

So far, more than 22,000 users have posted comments on Zuckerberg’s letter, most of which are positive feed backs.