I wrote a post the day of Facebook’s f8 developer conference trying to mitigate the outrage and panic expressed by a lot of Open advocates. Since I wrote that post, a great deal has happened within that community, and they’ve seized on the momentum of predicable grassroots backlash against Facebook as best as they can. Chris Messina very aptly described a world in which Google had adopted the same strategy Facebook has been trying to employ since it’s inception (and it wasn’t pretty). Hot on the heels of that, Google posterboy and search advice king Matt Cutts announced on Twitter that he was also opting out. Shortly thereafter, on various other social networks, literally hundreds of other Google employees left the system.

I’m pretty sure that most of these folks hadn’t had a chance to read my open letter yet, but hopefully they’ll at least skim this post. In my original post, I mentioned that one of the more common questions I got the day of f8 was “Why aren’t you outraged, Mark?”

I generally responded with: “I’m not outraged about this obvious landgrab today from Facebook because I’ve long since resigned myself to Facebooks dominance of the social web, regardless of how healthy or unhealthy for the rest of the web their actions may be. Basically, I’m incapable of sustaining rage for three years continuously about a single subject I can do next to nothing about.”

As it turns out, though, I found my outrage this week over Facebook, though it wasn’t over the topic most thought it would be.  I had written up the day of f8 about six thousand words going into depth of the potential impact and usages for the major announcements from Facebook.  Before I hit the publish button, though, I started taking cursory glances through what was available to actually use now, and it wasn’t all that impressive, especially compared with what was previously available.

The first place I started was with the new social analytics system from Facebook, called “Facebook Insights.”

Insights: Color Me Less Than Impressed and Not All That Scared

There were a number of issues with this system that could only best be illustrated through the liberal usage of screenshots.

My hope and original angle on the Facebook Insights program was that it could finally be the tipping point that pushed us as publishers past the pageview model in terms of how we monetize our work. I won’t go so far as to say that all current forms of monetization are completely broken, but there are major holes in the way it works.

If you haven’t heard my arguments on this in the past, it all revolves around how badly AdSense robs publishers that don’t have massive traffic and how easy it is to fraudulently increase your traffic numbers to make display-based advertising pay you far more than it should.

John Furrier and I have been talking privately for quite some time, for instance, that our efforts at content creation here at SiliconANGLE aren’t valued properly by current models.  As of this moment, we currently clock in a few hundred thousand pageviews a month on a good month, which we consider to be not a shabby accomplishment. The problem with that is we’re not big enough to really qualify for a high quality advertising network and capture the high-dollar CPMs, and even if we were, we’re only looking at a total monthly income ranging between $1000-6000, with current CPM valuations for mass internet media. Valuations using CPA and CPC systems would likely see significantly less income on our level of traffic.

Given that John and I are both family men and so are many of our writers, that income level isn’t sufficient to sustain the company (which is why we don’t operate on an advertising based business model).

If we were able to look at specific demographic data that told us who they were, what they did for a living, how much they shared our content and where, we’d have a much more compelling slice of information to use to sell ourselves as sponsorable media, particularly if Facebook was offering this information to all publishers.

This was the hope and dream of Facebook Insights: the potential to shake up the publishing business through Facebook’s mass and, well, insight.

Instead, this is what we get:

I would have expected Facebook to have a lot more detailed data on what was being said across it’s network than what is showing up in Facebook insights. I signed up for the program, and was first surprised to discover that they were only verifying that I owned the page (putting a tracking string in the metadata), instead of asking me to include a JavaScript.

That minor detail is very important.  Many of the folks who called me all concerned that the Facebook Insights program was a trojan horse for Facebook to attack Google on the Analytics and AdSense front have very misplaced fears. Based upon what’s provided and required to participate in the program, Facebook can only tell you what they already know, not what they may glean from what’s on your site.

Right now, even without Facebook Insights, tracking share data is a pretty dicey proposition. The public timeline isn’t available, and efforts to scrape or capture data on the way in is pretty difficult as well frowned upon by Facebook (if a URL to a comment on the system is shared, versus the URL to the parent post, the share data doesn’t always aggregate properly).

Still, the share data that Facebook registers was low by an order of ten as compared to conversations we’d tracked from our inbound links and known shared posts.

The same was true when I asked Facebook to track shares from my own website. If you look on my personal wall, there’s a discussion there (as well as in my “Posts” section) that were generated in the last week based off and linked back to posts from my own personal blog that weren’t tracked by Facebook Insights, either.

My hope, after playing with what data was available from Insights was that this is a vastly unfinished system.  That’s a sentiment fairly well confirmed by the fact that the Javascript doesn’t even render properly on my computer in Chrome or Firefox (“Saturday Apr th” as opposed to “Saturday Apr 16th”).

My hope continues to be that this system is improved, including data that they already have, and hope that they actually make this tool something I can use. As it now stands, this particular system poses no threat to the rest of the web in that “I’m scared about the stranglehold Facebook is getting on the Web” sense of the word.

Right now, it’s not even useful enough to be scary, but even if it lives up to it’s potential, the only disruption it could possibly cause would be both positive and healthy for the Web.

[Editor’s Note: Some images in this post courtesy of Chris Messina and Stormy Shippy. More posts coming over the next few days, microanalyzing the other features rolled out and announced at f8. –mrh]