Facebook is the unrivaled King among social media sites

Among many social networking sites like Facebook, Orkut, Twitter, Mypage etc; Facebook has emerged as the leader. Who says so? Google on 30^th May released Web traffic data indicating that Facebook is king when it comes to online visitors. Facebook still is the leader despite criticism about privacy at the social-networking service.

Facebook.com is visited monthly by 540 million people which is slightly more than 35 percent of the Internet population. Approximately 570 billion pages are viewed monthly at Facebook.com, which is more than eight times as many pages as are viewed each month at second-place Yahoo.com which gets 490 million visitors, according to Google.

Facebook has been carped by politicians, consumer groups and privacy advocates who want tighter safeguards on the personal information at the website. More than 30,000 people signed up at ”We’re Quitting Facebook” website as “committed” to dump the social-networking service. Despite all this the Facebook hits haven’t reduced, since that number represents less than .006 percent of Facebook’s 400 million members.

Facebook redesigned its privacy settings page to provide a single control for content and "significantly reduce" the amount of information that is always visible to everyone. Facebook claims to be giving users more control over how outside applications or websites access information at the service.

Facebook is being modified now so that there is less information that has to be public. People want a simple way to control the way information is shared with third parties. The changed privacy settings are already up on Facebook.

The critics have suggested Facebook to make the entire user information private by default and then let the people decide what they want to share.

But Facebook has rejected such a model, saying that the service is based on the premise that people want to connect and share with friends and people around them.

With the population of over 400 million members and the protesters as less as 30,000 people, Facebook will not be going down in recent coming years.

By ABHILASH OWK