It’s a pleasure to ‘talk’ with you. We are both interested in commerce but come from different vantage points. Looking forward to ongoing discussion.

Yeah, FB is tough for data. Either http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics or I sometimes dive into the ad engine and can calculate growth by geographies.

Privacy is in a redefinition phase…the commerce upsides of the ‘check-in’ FourSquare model is going to turn this around.

BTW–your comment systems doesn’t notify me of an ongoing comment string. My fault? Consider Disqus…advantages are many and the communities that use them are ones that you are interested in.

It would certainly be useful to have reliable stats for all the FB social plugins, but I’m not aware if/where FB make them available…

On privacy, interesting question – the Beacon debacle always lurks, but expectations do change with experience, and ultimately I think it’s all about an evolving privacy/utility tradeoff, as long as FB stay on the right side – offering compelling utility, I think they’ll take the hit on privacy (which is why I think FB Connect was so successful and made fewer waves than expected)…

Question for you…Outside of the normal Facebook Stats page, do you know of a resource that updates the ‘Likes’ and sites embedding social plug-ins number? Hard to find an accurate resource to trend this.

Re: privacy. Are you in agreement with DecisionStep that you link to in your post? My take is that commerce efficiency will change the privacy bar for most and that this debate is more noise than signal… http://bt.io/F4yU

I’m enjoying your blog.