Facebook Social Plugins Invade Over 100,000 Sites

by Truemorist | May 11, 2010 at 10:28 am

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Facebook Social Plugins take over the web! If you're a Facebook addict (c'mon, you're a Facebook addict), then you probably close facebook windows without logging out. This means that, when you visit a non-Facebook site, you see... Facebook activity! This is because Facebook has made agreements with over 100,000 sites to integrate logged-in user data with those sites.

Obviously, this social plugin thing is for marketing purposes, so we won't even begin to pretend that it's for anything else. The problem is that Facebook isn't... how do I say this nicely... smart enough to manage the inevitable privacy concerns. Facebook has a crappy history of totally dropping the ball every time they add a new feature. Every. Time. Seriously, they suck at this.

Needless to say, users are raising a collective eyebrow now that the entire Internet seems to "recognize" them. It's not that Facebook isn't saying that they respect user privacy- it's just that we know better than to believe them. After all, have you ever made it through an entire Facebook session without encountering a core feature that just doesn't work? Then you find a new "feature" that makes presumptions about what you want in your (Twitter ripoff) feed, or what you want the entire planet to see.

Facebook is fun, yeah, we get that. But how much longer will the fun outweigh the suck? The answer to that question is the same as the one for "How long before Facebook needs a CEO who actually understands real-world user behavior?"

Certainly, numbers like that are going to keep publishers experimenting with Facebook’s new features as a way to drive more engagement and traffic to their sites. Of course, that could all change if the user backlash against instant personalization continues to grow.