Despite all the recent hand-wringing about Facebook’s privacy failures and the company’s attempts to simplify privacy controls in response to the uproar over the past month and a half, there has been no visible impact on Facebook itself. In fact, the month of May was one of the strongest ones ever for Facebook, as measured by net new visitors.
According to comScore, Facebook attracted 130 million unique U.S. visitors in May, 2010, an increase of 8.6 million people. That jump represents the third largest single-month increase in unique visitors since comScore started measuring. Pageviews were up 11 percent in May to 55.5 billion.
Maybe all of those people were flocking to Facebook to change their privacy settings. Or maybe all of those Like buttons and other social plugins spreading all over the Web are increasing sharing and driving more traffic back to Facebook. More than 100,000 sites have installed Facebook’s social plugins.
So, yes, Facebook is pushing its culture of oversharing across the Web and that does raise serious privacy concerns. But are people quitting Facebook over the privacy issue? The data suggests the opposite. They are relying on Facebook even more than before.
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 845 million monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...
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