Social networking site Facebook is to ditch its requirement that users must have a university email address, according to media reports. 

Facebook required members to have a school or university email address, but added 1,000 approved work addresses in May allowing students that had graduated to continue to access the site.

Removing the need for approved email addresses will put the site in direct competition with other social networks such as MySpace, Bebo and Friendster. 

According to Forbes, Facebook planned to ditch approved email addresses today, but has since decided to delay the introduction owing to the backlash it received from unannounced upgrades launched last week. 

The new features, called News Feed and Mini-Feed, allowed users to view their friends' recent activity on the site, resulting in over 100,000 members claiming that the facility breached their privacy.

Facebook introduced new privacy controls as a result of the protests. "The recent outpouring of positive and negative feedback confirms the passion people feel for Facebook and its importance in their lives," claimed Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg.

"We think that News Feed and Mini-Feed offer something people cannot find anywhere else on the internet.

"These additional privacy features put control of who sees what information in News Feed and Mini-Feed directly in the hands of our users, just as they requested."

Zuckerberg admitted that the way the new features were introduced was a mistake. "We really messed this one up," he wrote on the Facebook blog. 

"When we launched News Feed and Mini-Feed we were trying to provide a stream of information about your social world.

"Instead, we did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them. I'd like to try to correct those errors now."

Video sharing site YouTube launched a service available exclusively to US college students at the end of August.

Colleges on YouTube requires members to have a .edu email address to sign up for the service, which are only available to students and faculty members.