I recently read a most illuminating article about Facebook and Analytics - written by the key analytics figure, John Lovett, whose background in the field is exceptionally strong.

The Facebook "ecosystem" includes Pages, Tabs (such as the famous Wall), Advertisements, Facebook Share, Facebook Connect and more. It's all mixed together with Facebook's own sauce of proprietary FBML (Facebook Markup Language), FBJS (Facebook JavaScript), plus a prohibition on conventional JavaScript tagging that is the life-blood of many analytics packages.

The top-shelf analytics vendors have been working on Facebook capabilities for a while, but the land still has many roaming dragons. Lovett's Part One presents an excellent beginning at framing the situation. I'm definitely looking forward to the more detailed Part Two!

...our inquiries exposed a world of complexity in terms of what's measurable according to the emerging Facebook rules and exactly how organizations would benefit from measuring behavior within the walled social networking ecosystem.

...Measuring Facebook is no easy task. Despite the fact that over 400 million users access the site regularly, the visibility into the actions, behavior, and demographics is carefully guarded. Each of the vendors we interviewed was highly sensitive to Facebook rules and the privacy of its citizens.

[john.webanalyticsdemystified.com...]