Yesterday was marked “Quit Facebook Day” thanks to a website which called on users to protest against the company for violating users’ trust and not providing sufficient privacy controls. The day came and went and the vast majority of users logged in to the site rather than deleting their accounts. While we can’t say that it wasn’t expected, the movement didn’t go unnoticed by mainstream media who took every opportunity to cover the event.

The timing of the “Quit Facebook Day” was what helped drive the media attention. For the past month Facebook has been the subject of intense scrutiny by the media, and even folks on Capital Hill who would like the company to be more transparent with their privacy system. Last week Facebook responded and so far the privacy advocates have been relatively silent.

For those anticipating some sort of privacy scandal climax that would result in a mass exodus or legislation of online privacy rights, you will have to wait. Instead, Facebook is slowly rolling out their new privacy settings, and many are waiting to see what the impact is. One thing is clear: despite the media backlash against Facebook’s privacy policies and methods of making changes, most users are willing to stay on the site, even with Facebook’s controversial products, like “Instant Personalization”, and open settings.

For now, the “Quit Facebook Day” movement appears to have been insignificant, but there is at least one sign that some users have turned away from the site. Alexa, a site which monitors internet traffic around the globe, shows a slight decline in traffic to Facebook over the past two weeks. Such short-term trends are not out of the ordinary however, as Facebook has seen such shifts in the past.

For those who are looking for more ominous signs that users are heading for the exits en masse, you’ll have to wait as yesterday was not the day the mass exodus took place.

A new software package, promising to enable you to reach hundreds of thousands of people on Facebook, will take your money in exchange for software which will spam the hell out of Facebook. While we haven’t purchased the application, it’s clearly against Facebook’s terms and is probably not the best way to build a “viral marketing” campaign. The application could also be the source of much of the Facebook Page spamming that users have been reporting to us in recent days.

Some of the key features of Facebook Wizard is the following:

• Automatically add friends at random
• Spam Facebook Pages by automatically liking and commenting on updates
• Avoid being blocked by Facebook’s captcha via a “decaptcha” feature
• Proxy support to hide detection from Facebook’s automated spam detectors

So buy this program and get ready to go viral! Not! My guess is that Facebook will have this shut down in a matter of days. While the application could possibly work, this is definitely not the way to go about building a marketing campaign. If you want to try out blasting your friends (and their friends) with a bunch of spam messages, go download the Facebook Wizard for a mere $95. It’s a great way to quickly throw some money out the window!

If the latest statistics from Google are accurate, Facebook’s 540 million unique monthly users account for almost 143 page views each month. Facebook also has 8 times as many page views as Yahoo! does each month, although that has been pretty well known for some time now. Below are some other interesting statistics found through Google’s doubleclick ad planner which lists the 1,000 most popular websites.

• Facebook has 7.5 times as many monthly unique visitors as MySpace
• Twitter appears to be doubling in size every six months and is 33 percent larger than MySpace
• Users of Baidu, a Chinese social network, view an average of 117 page views per month
• Facebook has more page views than the next 100 largest websites on the internet combined each month

Today Facebook officially announced the option for allowing users to completely opt-out of the Facebook Platform and prevent applications from gaining access to their information. While many developers are rightfully concerned about the feature, we’d like to take the opportunity to thoroughly address how the new “opt-out button” functions and what it will mean for developers.

How To Turn Off The Facebook Platform

Prior to jumping into what the implications of the new button that lets you turn off the Facebook Platform and block all applications, we thought it would be useful to share how to block the Facebook Platform under the new configuration. It’s pretty easy to get to the button which says “Turn Off Platform”. We go through the three steps below:

Step 1: Click on “Edit Your Settings” under “Applications And Websites” on the new privacy settings page.

Step 2: Click on the link which says “Turn off all platform applications”

Step 3: Click on “Select All” and then the “Turn Off Platform” button

What This Means

For Users

The first thing to understand is what this means for users. Users will now be able to block all applications in only a few clicks. While much of this was previously possible, the major differentiator is that users will now be able to block all forms of app-to-user communications. Application requests, etc, will be blocked. One important thing that was clarified to us by a Facebook spokesperson was the following:

Users may choose to opt-out of of sharing their data with applications on Facebook Platform, however they will continue to see stories from applications that their friends use in their stream.

So yes, you can’t stop your friends from posting application stories, but you can choose to block them from sending you requests or any other form of “spam-like” communication from apps. However turning off the platform means users will not be able to install applications. Facebook users may also be prompted with the opportunity to turn the Platform back on. As Bret Taylor described on the developer blog today:

Users will have multiple opportunities to turn Platform back on. For example, when users who have turned off Platform click a Facebook login button in your application, they will be prompted to turn Platform back on before they can continue. Likewise, social plugins will not show any personalized content for these users until they click a “Turn Platform on” button on the plugin.

For Developers

For developers, the risk of a large number of users turning off the Platform is a real one. However, as any developer knows, five clicks is more than one, which means there’s already a significant hurdle to blocking applications. Additionally, as soon as a user sees all the applications they can no longer use, there’s a greater chance that they will stick around.

If a user blocks applications all together though, that’s one less user that application developers will have the opportunity to market to directly (through app-to-user communications). However stream stories will still be posted and developers have the opportunity to promote their application via advertisements and essentially convince users to install their applications, in turn turning the Platform back on.

So will this kill application growth? Probably not. However it’s definitely interesting to see that Facebook is letting users opt-out of one of the most integral components of the site. Do you think this will be valuable for users? If you’re a developer, what concerns do you have?

Tomorrow Facebook will be speaking with hill staffers about the company’s new privacy settings which are expected to be rolled out at some point during the day (the time of which has not been specified yet). A public Facebook event, first spotted by Mashable, describes the new event and also happens to be one of the company’s recently hired employees, Corey Owens‘, first events on the hill as a Facebook employees, which will surely be interesting.

While it will be more of an educational program, as Facebook regularly educates staffers on how to reach out to constituents using the Platform, it comes at a time when the company is under intense scrutiny. Just recently, a number of Senators teamed up to request that Facebook make their new “Instant Personalization” service opt-in.

However as we wrote yesterday, don’t expect Facebook to cave to the Senators’ demands. Instead, the company will roll out simple privacy settings that should make controlling access to date more obvious. Tomorrow we’ll find out the full details though according to Chris Cox, who announced the rollout while at the Techcrunch Disrupt conference today in New York City.

Here’s the description posted on the Facebook event page:

** This briefing is open to House and Senate staff only **

In Monday’s Washington Post, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg told readers that Facebook has listened to feedback from users, legislators, and consumer groups and will be launching a new suite of simpler and easier-to-use privacy tools. Come learn about what these tools mean for your constituents and the future of sharing online. This briefing will include a Q&A session.