ReadWriteWeb

Some ReadWriteWeb writers are feverishly checking Facebook hourly while others settle with a few times per day. At least one staffer admitted to only checking daily unless he was in a conversation that forced him to socialize there. We wondered how often you checked in with your favorite time waster.

How often do you check Facebook?

We asked and culled your responses from Facebook, Google+ and Twitter and we used Storify to present it all back to you. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.

New research sponsored by Facebook out of a Milan computer science university shows that the old saw of there being six degrees of separation is no longer accurate. Call it 4.7 degrees instead. The researchers used a random sampling of half a million Facebook users who were active in May 2011 and mapped their social graphs.

There's been a lot of discussion lately over Facebook's so-called "frictionless sharing" and whether it's manipulative and somewhat bad for the social Web or simply a redefinition of how things get shared online. As our own Scott M. Fulton III points out, it's easy enough to simply opt out of the feature altogether.

An early and central component to this new type of all-or-nothing sharing is Facebook's integration with Spotify and similar music streaming services. In theory, it adds a useful new social layer to the experience of listening to music online. In practice, however, it's not well-executed enough for me to keep it activated.

Facebook's frictionless sharing is not as popular as the company might have hoped. While they tout an easy way to share your current activity, others fear a world that documents our every move. Richard sees it more of a redefinition of sharing by Facebook and Marshall thinks it's just plain wrong and a lost opportunity. And though Scott points out that you certainly can "opt-out" of frictionless sharing, he also wonders if you should have to do so.

Do you want to share everything with everyone or is the idea of sharing your every move just a bit freaky to you too?

We asked and culled your responses from Facebook, Google+ and Twitter and we used Storify to present it all back to you. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.

Today, AllThingsD announced that the Facebook HTC phone is really coming. It's called Buffy, and is expected to arrive in the next 12-18 months. It is "planned to run on a modified version of Android that Facebook has tweaked heavily to deeply integrate its services, as well as to support HTML5 as a platform for applications, according to sources familiar with the project."

While the Buffy news seems striking, it is actually just confirmation of Facebook's serious leap into the mobile space, which has already been in the works for more than a year.

Hypothetical situation: You want to be on Facebook 24/7, but you don't want to keep your browser open. Facebook sees your problem, and raises you a Windows 7 desktop client, which includes Chat, the News Ticker and notifications. Today, Facebook rolled out this new messenger to a limited number of users. This real-time messenger for Windows ticker plus chat desktop client is one way to focus solely on the messaging aspects of Facebook.

Today Facebook began rolling out its newest update: Sponsored stories will begin appearing in the news ticker, that annoying, never-ending additional noise contributor located in the upper-righthand corner of your Facebook homepage.

Dropping sponsored stories into the news ticker was the next logical move for Facebook. But users weren't happy about the news ticker launch in the first place. It received a ton of complaints; teens, for one, called it a stalker tool. Now the news ticker is more akin to a spammer tool.

"You can always opt out," said the fellow at the other end of the table, reminding me of that most priceless freedom which the Internet, in all its majesty, has given me, given us, given the people. "If you don't want to share anything with anyone, hell, why would you join a social network at all?"

And therein lay the small print, the disclosure at the other end of the asterisk. Opting out* is already carrying with it a social stigma, the personal choice to remain behind doors with locks and windows with shutters, to not be One of Us. At the same time, it is the new symbol of American freedom as professed by its right wing, the inalienable right for each of us to exit, to withdraw, to take the door other fools would take: the right to do the wrong thing.

Facebook's new frictionless sharing features are "ruining sharing," according to a thought provoking article by CNET's Molly Wood. In response, our own Marshall Kirkpatrick argued that Facebook's seamless sharing is badly implemented and flat out "wrong."

Both made great points, but ultimately I don't believe that frictionless sharing is a bad concept. What's more, I disagree that it has ruined sharing. What Facebook has done is re-define sharing. I think it was an ingenious move and I predict that soon Facebook's seamless sharing will be the norm.

Facebook recently instituted a new program that makes it easy for 3rd party websites and services to automatically post links about your activity elsewhere back into Facebook and the newsfeeds of your friends. It's called Seamless Sharing (a.k.a. frictionless sharing) and there's a big backlash growing about it, reminiscent of the best-known time Facebook tried to do something like this with a program called Beacon. The company has done things like this time and time again.

Critics say that Seamless Sharing is causing over-sharing, violations of privacy, self-censorship with regard to what people read, dilution of value in the Facebook experience and more. CNet's Molly Wood says it is ruining sharing. I think there's something more fundamental going on than this - I think this is a violation of the relationship between the web and its users. Facebook is acting like malware.