Beacon protests a hundred times smaller than News Feed uproar
Maybe Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has so far declined to talk to Robert Scoble — real, fake, or otherwise — and other bloggers for a simple reason. He knows the vast majority of Facebook users, still mostly high school and college kids, don't know and don't care about Facebook Beacon. That's what the above poll indicates. It's not the only evidence.
Bloggers like to compare the Beacon scandal to the mess Facebook made when it clumsily introduced its news feed last year. But let's be clear. The user revolts Facebook witnessed in September 2006 were on an entirely different scale — as in, they were much, much larger.
The day after Facebook announced the news feed, 587,715 members joined a protest group called "Students against Facebook News Feed." Keep in mind, Facebook only had 9 million members at that point. That means nearly 7 percent of all Facebook members joined the group in one day.
Compare that to the protest group MoveOn.org launched on November 20. Two weeks later, only 70,000 members have joined. That's only 0.1 percent of Facebook's 57 million active users protesting the product.