WatchMojo.com has a useful analysis of the new Facebook Platform (the thing that’s recently caused your Facebook newsfeed to be overrun with invitations to add applications of one kind or another). Among the striking statistics cited recently by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, they note that Facebook claims:
– the 25 and over age group is the fastest growing segment on the site
– subscribers are growing 3% per week, or 100,000 new users per day
– average pageviews per person: a whopping 50 (!)
– 50% of registered users come back to the site every day.
– Facebook is generating more than 40 billion page views per month. That’s 50 pages per user every day.
– 6th most trafficked site in the U.S.
– More page views than eBay. Says they are targeting Google next.
So? Well, the consensus among tech bloggers is that Facebook’s masterstroke with the new Platform is that it turns Facebook into the omnipresent intermediary accompanying ever more of us through an ever increasing proportion of the time we spend online. In other words: “Many folks are starting to worry that Google’s omnipresence is making Standard Oil or Microsoft look like the Muppet Show… if that is the case, then they better be careful what they’re asking for with Facebook’s latest push.”
Still, on the upside, some of the initial privacy concerns about how Facebook Platform will employ users’ data seem to have eased a little. The American Civil Liberties Union has a short analysis that gives Facebook credit for allowing users to set their own privacy settings, and notes that while application developers have access to users’ data, they’re still bound by both contractual obligations and technical means to respect privacy. But, Facebook can’t screen all developers for trustworthiness – so:
Users should be more vigilant than ever about controlling access to personal information now that responsibility for keeping such information safe can now fall to an array of individual developers instead of a single company.
Our favourite application so far? The Friend Wheel.
