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SAN FRANCISCO, May 10 — Facebook, the social networking Web site, is adding free classified ad listings, putting it into competition with dozens of established companies like Craigslist and many newspapers.

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Daniel Acker/Bloomberg News

Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook, the social networking site.

Facebook, which has 22 million active users, more than half of them in high school or college, hopes that the new feature will offer yet another reason for users to return to its site regularly, instead of going elsewhere to conduct their Internet business.

“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,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, who noted that more than 60 percent of the site’s active users log in each day. “If we can provide people with efficient tools, they will use the site more.”

Facebook, based in Palo Alto, Calif., is calling the new service Marketplace and plans to introduce it on Friday. It will allow users to create classified listings in four categories: housing; jobs; for sale, where users can list things like concert tickets and used bikes; and “other,” a catch-all that could include things like solicitations for rides home for the holidays.

Facebook users who create classifieds can choose to show them only to their designated friends on the service, or to anyone in one of their “networks” — their high school, college, company or geographic region. They can choose to make the listings appear on their profile pages, and send them out on “news feeds,” the automatic updates that appear when users log in to the site.

Mr. Zuckerberg created Facebook as an undergraduate at Harvard in 2004. It is now the nation’s sixth-most-visited Web site, according to the tracking firm ComScore. Its popularity is based partly on the privacy measures it offers. Only designated friends or people in users’ networks can see their full profile pages, in contrast to the chaotic freedom on MySpace, the site owned by the News Corporation that is Facebook’s main rival.

The combination of social networking and classified advertising appears to be in vogue these days. MySpace, the largest social networking site, has offered classified advertising nearly since its introduction; Friendster, which has been surpassed by newer entrants to the market, also said this week that it was adding classifieds through a partnership with Olx.com.

“The advantage of having classifieds linked to a social network is that you know something about the seller,” said Charlene Li, an analyst at Forrester Research. “You are less likely to buy a lemon from someone who is a friend of yours.”

On Facebook, buyers will be able to see how they are connected to the seller — the series of links between the friends they share. “There are no anonymous listings, and we give you a very clear path to see how you can trust the other person you are conducting business with,” Mr. Zuckerberg said.

Although the Facebook Marketplace is free, it could eventually create some revenue for the company, which has reportedly shunned acquisition offers in the past from Yahoo. Mr. Zuckerberg said he planned to one day allow sellers to pay to more widely promote their listings on the site. He also noted that the service could create new opportunities to serve up related ads around certain kinds of listings.

Many established companies are likely to be paying attention to the new service. Most notably, Craigslist, which is based in San Francisco and offers classified ads for more than 300 cities that are largely free. Job sites like Monster.com and CareerBuilder, which have services aimed at college graduates, are also likely to take notice, as are dozens of other online classified ventures and car-trading sites.

Traditional media like college newspapers, which rely to a varying degree on classified ads, may be threatened as well. “If Facebook can provide a larger audience at a lower price than traditional media, people will shift their advertising dollars,” said Daniel A. Jauernig, chief executive of Classified Ventures, a joint venture of five media companies including the Tribune Company and the Washington Post Company.