Facebook has its good and bad days. If we are talking about Facebook and privacy then it’s probably a bad day. In this case, we are talking about the rapid adoption of Facebook’s set of social plugins, in particular their “Like” button. According to Facebook they have hit the “50,000 sites served” mark with these new social media integration tools.

TechCrunch tells us some more

Facebook has just given us an idea of how quickly these widgets are being adopted: a week after f8, 50,000 websites now feature the Like button and the other new plugins.

75 of those websites were Facebook’s launch partners, which included sites like CNN and the New York Times — everyone else handled the integration on their own, which Facebook has made very straightforward (it generally just involves copy-and-pasting a few lines of code). This growth is important, because as more sites integrate these social widgets, Facebook will increasingly own social interaction across the web.

In classic Facebook fashion, the wizard of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, made the prediction there would be over 1 billlion “likes” in the first 24 hours of the service’s existence. I say classic fashion because it was such an outrageous claim and read as if there would be 1 billion hits of a like button there was need for Zuckerberg spin control as TC reported an update

A Facebook spokesman has clarified that Zuckerberg was referring to the number of impressions the Like button had, not how many times people clicked the Like button.

Spin is still the forefront of the Internet hype and hyperbole machine. Facebook does it better than anyone. With their predictions and then their “cat who ate the canary” looks when confronted with privacy matters, it gets ridiculous but guess what? We’re stuck with it because they are big and getting more powerful.

So do you “like” Facebook and their approach or are you just going to play along because there are no other options?