After the earlier Facebook privacy concerns, the firms head of privacy has used the launch of a UK office to address the points raised.

Perhaps the most interesting statistic from the article is that following the publicity about the changes, 20% of users had updated their profile privacy settings.

There are a number of other interesting statistics too:

• The UK is the fastest growing market, but unlike the USA it is attracting older users – 54% of UK users are over 25, and over 35’s are the fastest growing group.
• Facebook is not the largest social networking site in the UK – currently MySpace and Bebo are bigger. However if the current growth continues Facebook is predicted to pass MySpace this month.
• The opening up of the site has radically changed the demographics of the user base – 75% of users are now outside college.
• The company has a revised target of 60,000,000 active users worldwide by the end of the year – the original target for the year, already surpassed, was 40,000,000.
• The company identify the application platform as being a major growth factor – currently there are 3000 applications available, and apparently 80,000 developers working on the platform.

Anyway, the application platform has given me a way around one of my original annoyances, which was that a number of friends were primarily operating through Facebook and getting grumpy that my profile was largely empty. I’ve still got a largely empty profile – but thanks to a great little WordPress plug-in called Wordbook details of my posts on here are automatically placed into the mini-feed on Facebook. There were a number of variations around for integrating blogs, but this seemed to be the best for me as it was all automatic, plus it didn’t rely on dumping large amounts of my content into Facebook, or my having to manually select posts on the Facebook end to work. Alongside this I’ve also added a feed for my pictures from Flickr – again this is a tool that links back to the original pictures on Flickr rather than dumping all the data onto Facebook