Plus, there’s more: Publishers installing Facebook share buttons can also get data back related to how many times that link has been shared, how many users have hit the thumbs-up “like” button or commented on shared versions of the story on Facebook, and how many people have clicked back to it through Facebook.

These Facebook “share” buttons had existed before, and the company said that more than 2 billion pieces of content are shared per week. But this is the first time that the counter and analytics have been available.

A post on the Facebook developer blog explains: “Anyone can add the Share button to their website with little to no technical experience, and style the button from a variety of options.” Accessing the analytics however, requires a bit more coding know-how.

This could spell bad news for Digg, as Facebook’s significantly bigger and more mainstream audience could make it a far more appealing choice for site owners that would prefer to display one prominent sharing button rather than two. As for Twitter, it doesn’t actually own the app that powers the “retweet” buttons. A move like this from Facebook, however, could push it to think a bit harder about a partnership or acquisition–or hasten progress on that “retweet API” it has in the works.

Related speculation: When are we going to see a “most-shared” ranking from Facebook? That’s when Digg’s execs would really have to start sweating.

Yahoo’s Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Labs, said that the company could potentially “mine” messages from Twitter, the popular microblogging service, to offer Web surfers search results beyond those offered by Microsoft’s Bing.”I’ve always held that the interesting thing of Tweets is not necessarily searching them but mining them. So we could real-time mine them, then assemble what we mine into the search engine,” said Raghavan in an interview with Reuters on Friday.

I find this very interesting, specifically because of the Yahoo & Microsoft deal that happened last week and the fact that Microsoft’s Bing does a lot with Twitter on several fronts.

A WebmasterWorld thread has some strong feedback from members of the thread. One even took the time to list eight reasons why Yahoo should not do this:

1. Bing already offers live related twitter messages on some serps.
2. Don’t base your companies future on the success of another, as twitter goes so will Yahoo!
3. Using Twitter as a source of quality information?!? Run for the hills!
4. Google already does it better, I’ve had articles fully indexed in under 30 seconds (might have been faster, that’s the time it took me to check when I got immediate traffic while making an edit)
5. Did I mention Twitter is 99% spam? Seriously, no.
6. It didn’t work when RSS was all the rage either. The immediacy is not the message and neither is the medium in this case.
7. Any system that allows everyone to dump comments into one local area can match the speed of twitter, build that instead and add a little QC… now that I would back in a heartbeat. I searched for a keyword on Twitter tonight and you don’t want to know how low the quality of the results were.
8. People like Twitter because it gets their message out there fast and that quality doesn’t carry over to search. Honestly I prefer quality in my search results, not speed. Speed is pointless if I don’t perform a search at the moment it’s indexed anyway. Quality, please!

I agree that this is a space that Yahoo shouldn’t get into when they are out of the search business.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.