I don’t want to quote too much from Matthew Berk’s fascinating URL analysis because it’s worth reading the whole thing. So I’ll just tease the following line from Study of ~1.3 Billion URLs: ~22% of Web Pages Reference Facebook:
It’s taken roughly a decade for Facebook to not only accrue roughly a billion users, but to entangle itself in about a fifth of the Web.
Ok, maybe one more bit, where he talks about the implications of all this traffic flowing through proprietary web properties:
Increasingly, people and organizations will seek to write themselves not to Web sites, but to the big “platforms” (APIs) like Facebook and Twitter. And more and more, Web sites are being rewoven into those social networks, whether by simple inclusions of “like” or “+1″ buttons, or through more complex reflections of social connection. [“¦]
My key takeaway here is that although Facebook may know about a sizable portion of the Web, the Web barely knows anything about what’s inside of Facebook.