The social networking site Facebook is now putting its site regulations and privacy policies in the hands of its users. The members will have the option to vote on future policies governing the service, as Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said users will have the ability to provide extensive feedback on the social networking site’s governing policies, Facebook’s Guiding Principles and its Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. Users will review, comment and ultimately vote on revisions of the documents.

Zuckeberg said on a blog posting that he thinks these steps are very important in promoting understanding and enabling participation on the Web. As previously mentioned, the site offers for debate its Guiding Principles and its Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, which replaces the company’s existing Terms of Use policy. During the next 30 days, users will provide comments by joining online groups to discuss each document.

Afterwards, the site will review the feedback and republish both policies with the incorporated changes, once the comment period closes on March 29. The results of the votes will be made public, and will be binding if more than 30 percent of all active registered users participate in the voting process. If users will successfully approve the draft documents, a precedent could be set requiring that all future policy changes to be subject to a user vote.

Furthermore, Facebook is also creating a user council intended to create user participation in policy development and discussion. The site wants to invite users to serve as the council’s founding members. Basically, Zuckerberg wants to create a new relationship between Internet companies and the people they serve. Some of the significant changes in Facebook’s recently drafted Statement of Rights and Responsibilities include a clause stating that users own the content they share through the site’s services and that Facebook’s permission to access the member-generated content expires when users delete the information or when the accounts are terminated.

Facebook is currently leading this emerging market, as it has outdistanced its closest rival, MySpace, in number with 175 million active users, compared with MySpace’s 130 million. MySpace is coming close to achieving $1 billion in revenue, while Facebook generated less than $300 million in sales last year.

It looks like the company finally acknowledged that it’s a Web 2.0 company and users, not professionals, provide most of the content. It remains to be seen if they’ll manage to have the desired success with this campaign, because this can really be considered a breakthrough on the social networking sites’ market.