When Facebook released Facebook Beacon last month to hungry advertisers at Ad-Tech NYC, all the advertiser had to do was "…Add 3 lines of code and reach millions of users", according to Facebook.

"… When a user performs the action, they will be alerted that your website is sending a story to their profile and have a chance to opt out. No additional user action is needed for the story to be published on Facebook, and users remain in control of their information."

Many people were enraged when they got a closer look at Facebook Beacon and realized they were giving away so much data (to Facebook) and getting  back nothing for it, really.  One of the first to stand up against Facebook was GigaOM's Om Malik (who I hope to meet at LeWeb3 next week in Paris) in a November 6 post titled Is Facebook Beacon a Privacy Nightmare?

".. While it seems to be a clever idea, a quick review reveals that Beacon might turn out to be a privacy hairball for the company."

"… partner sites put a little a piece of Facebook javascript on their web site and certain information, cleverly (and innocuously) labeled as a user alert, is sent to Facebook. For instance, Fandago users can publish information about the movies they saw. It all seems like a clever idea because it lets Facebook triangulate your likes and dislikes even more, and deliver more focused ads."

And then MoveOn.org got involved and attacked Facebook's Beacon later on in November, just before Thanksgiving:

"..Online activist group MoveOn.org is poised to announce a campaign targeting Facebook's "Beacon" advertisements, which post information about users' activity on partner sites (movie rentals, purchases from online retailers) onto their friends' News Feeds. According to MoveOn representatives, the organization considers this to be a "glaring violation of (Facebook's) users' privacy," and has launched a paid ad campaign on Facebook, a "protest group" on the social-networking site, and an online petition to encourage the company to allow users to opt into the program at their own volition."

Recently Facebook's  Mark Zuckerberg admitted they were wrong and changed Facebook's TOS to make it easier to Opt-Out, according to AdHurl's George Parker in a post titled: Is Facebook over faced? i.e. Over?:

".. finally, Mark Zuckerberg has owned up to the fact that sometimes greed can blinker what it is that made him so successful in the first place."

And Gary Bourgeault wrote a post on Facebook's Challenge - he was being openly skeptical of Facebook and it's claims of traffic:

"..The challenge for Facebook is how can they keep growing and keep the "cool" factor in place. I believe the answer is that they can't."

But with all that negative publicity you'd think that Facebook's traffic would go down  - except that Analytics reporting firm Compete.com said the traffic to Facebook went up, instead, in a post titled RIP Facebook? Not yet. Unique Visitors to Facebook.com jumped 20% in November; but then, 67% of Facebook users never heard of Beacon, as reported in the Compete.com blog:

"..According to one Facebook poll, 67% of all respondents had not even heard of the Facebook Beacon.

It’s generally a good idea to put users first, then investors. I hope the good people at Facebook HQ wake up quickly."

 

I didn't bother posting about Facebook's traffic increase though it didn't make sense then, now it does; Facebook's traffic numbers are inflated and this was addressed in a TechCrunch post today, titled, Is Beacon Inflating Facebook’s Visitor Numbers? where it's proven that Beacon's existence is upping Facebook's traffic numbers:

 "..Could the increase have had anything to do with the launch of Beacon in early November?

 

In a word, yes. Every time someone visits a Facebook Beacon partner (there were 40 of them at the time of the announcement) and performs a pre-defined action like writing a review or rating a hotel, a little Beacon toast pops up alerting you that your action is being sent to Facebook. That pop-up is actually coming from Facebook, and in some cases may be counted as a Facebook page even though the person seeing it does not normally click through to Facebook. It is triggered by a tag on the partner’s page known as an iFrame, which then tells your browser to load a page from Facebook within the site you happen to be visiting. This occurs even when a non-Facebook member visits that page and performs the same action. In that case, it creates a ghost iFrame, though, because the viewer does not see anything. But data is still sent to Facebook.

I called up Jay Meattle at Compete, who wrote the post, and he confirmed that of the 29.2 million unique visitors Compete counted for Facebook in November, those could also include visitors to Facebook iFrame “pages,” which are really nothing more than a pop-up on a partner site.

I knew the Facebook numbers didn't make much sense in the last two months and now I know why.