Facebook has made a number of changes to its privacy settings to make it easier to limit shared items to certain groups, bringing it more in line with the privacy-focused Google+. In a Facebook Blog post, the company outlined how to use the slightly modified features to limit who can see various parts of your profile and wall posts, and even put permanent limits on who can tag you in photos. The changes are slowly rolling out to Facebook users "in the coming days."

Facebook was once known for its extensive privacy controls compared to MySpace, but over the years, the company's reputation in this area has diminished thanks to an increased focus on pushing users to connect to more people and share more information. Most of Facebook's granular controls have remained stuck deep within the bowels of its privacy settings, however, where only the most curious of users have managed to discover them.

Facebook is apparently aware of this problem. "The main change is moving most of your controls from a settings page to being inline, right next to the posts, photos and tags they affect," Facebook VP of Product Chris Cox wrote in Tuesday's blog post. "Your profile should feel like your home on the web—you should never feel like stuff appears there that you don't want, and you should never wonder who sees what's there."

So what are some of the changes? For one, you can now more easily specify next to every single profile element (your favorite music or your favorite books, for example) whether you want it to be public, limited to friends, or customized. Facebook is also going to make it much easier to set those same limits when making a wall post. Previously, users had to click on a not-easily-noticeable gray lock icon in order to see their sharing options, but now the company is putting this out front with a big blue button—a more obvious visual cue that the post can be limited if you want.

Facebook has borrowed another item from Google+'s playbook by moving its "View Profile As" feature to a more obvious spot. (Once again, this feature existed on Facebook previously, but the number of people who knew about it could probably be counted on one hand.) It's now located at the top of your profile on the right side so that you can always see what your page looks like to dear old Mom or Dad. And—all hail Zuckerberg—Facebook has finally added the ability to edit your posts once they go live. Now, if you make a typo or over-share just one too many details, you don't need to delete the post altogether in order to make it right. This is such a simple and obvious feature that it's almost shocking that it wasn't part of Facebook before, though Twitter also lacks a way to edit posts once they go live. (Google+ already has this feature.)

The most interesting new features, however, come as part of Facebook's makeover to the photo tagging section. "When we asked, people had different ideas of what removing a tag actually did, and different motivations for wanting to remove them," Cox wrote. As a result, Facebook is now making it possible for users to not only remove a tag on a photo, but ask the user in question to take it down via the Facebook interface, or even block the user directly from the tagging area. Or, if you don't want to necessarily block that person but you do want to approve all of his or her tags of you before they show up on your wall, you can do that now too. Mom's always posting embarrassing baby pics to your profile with your name on them? Tell Facebook to ask you to approve all of her tags before they go up.

There are still a number of ways in which Google+'s sharing options are more robust than Facebook's—for example, Facebook lists (which are akin to Google+ Circles) are still not very easily discoverable, and the company even stated when it introduced Groups that lists were being pushed to the background. That may be changing, though, as Cox's blog post specifically mentions that the sharing drop-down menu on Facebook will soon include any friend lists you've created. To us, it's clear that Facebook is reacting to the choices Google+ has made when it comes to selectively sharing information.

But even if Facebook is only reacting and not innovating on its own, the outcome will be positive—Facebook users are in desperate need of more obvious privacy controls, and now they're actually beginning to get them. It's not enough to simply offer the controls buried within the labyrinth that is known as "settings;" the controls need to be out in front and easy to use in order for the masses to pick up on them. This is hopefully just the beginning for Facebook.