Despite Jason Perlow's ramblings, the Facebook momentum continues to grow. People are clicking "Like" all across the Web and sharing more than ever about themselves on the social networking site, just as Facebook and its partners had hoped.
In a post on its developer's blog today, Facebook said that more than 100,000 sites have already integrated social plug-ins and that early results prove that people want to "interact and share and see what their friends recommend." Some of the early results:
- News sites are seeing significant increases in daily referral traffic with the Washington Post reporting a 290 percent jump and ABC News up by 250 percent. The Globe and Mail in Canada reported an 80 percent jump in referral traffic and said that people who have liked its Facebook page are commenting, sharing and reading more.
- IMDb.com has seen daily referral traffic from Facebook double.
- NHL.com has seen an 80 percent increase as people interact with articles, scores and videos.
- Publishing site Scribd has seen referral traffic double.
No where in the post - obviously - was there any mention about the privacy concerns that have been raised recently. What's really telling about that is that Facebook doesn't really have a need to talk about those concerns. Facebook users clearly are not overly concerned with privacy and continue to share share share anything and everything they can.
Perlow has done his part to educate readers. Social networking expert Jennifer Leggio has chimed in about taking a new approach to Facebook to regain control over who sees what. And I've chimed in about the privacy and communications blunders at Facebook. Even privacy groups and government leaders are waving red flags.
And yet...
We've done what we've can to educate and inform. Beyond that, it's hard to feel bad for those who will inevitably cry foul over privacy breeches later but didn't take the time to think about what they were sharing on Facebook that might lead to such a breech.
Live and learn, I suppose.
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