Popular social networking website Facebook has revealed it will be going into competition with newspapers across the US, by offering free classified ad listings.With over 20 million active users on the site, it is thought that the new developments will encourage people to conduct more of their online business via Facebook.
The classified listings will be separated into four categories and operate under the name 'Marketplace'.
'Housing' and 'job' listing categories are self-explanatory, while the 'for sale' category will deal with things such as concert tickets that users want to offload.
The last category is named 'other', which is a catch-all strand that will offer people the chance to do things like organise shared lifts.
Users that decide to place classified ads can only make them available to added friends they have or any people in their networks.
Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg told the New York Times that 60 per cent of the people who actively use the site do so every day.
"We don't try to lock people up or take more of their time, but we try to provide them with easier ways to do the things they want to do on the internet," he said. "If we can provide people with efficient tools, they will use the site more."
In the past, Facebook has reportedly rejected acquisition offers from search engine Yahoo! and is particularly popular with school and university students, with over half of US users in high school or college.
It is the world's number one site for photos, ahead of Yahoo!'s popular sharing site Flickr, and is the sixth most visited site in the US.
