Update:
The number of Likes for the Bitcoin Users Org on Facebook has actually gone down a little since I first posted this. It is now 244,724 (granted it only dropped by 20) but it has not increased at all. So does that mean the popularity of Bitcoin has remained stagnant this past month? Perhaps it could be tied to the stagnation in price too? I know, many of us here are not Facebook users (as discussed) but I wanted to watch this to see if there was any growth as the price grows. It will be interesting to me what the price per BTC is when there is a user group on Facebook that is larger than 1,000,000.
It comes to no surprise that this thread was opened by a female, women typically posses a higher social intelligence, problem is it's really not applicable in this case.
Personally I don't really think the amount of FB "Likes" has any relation to the amount of people using Bitcoin nor is it any sort of gauge for public knowledge/understanding of Bitcoin. I agree with the statement that there are 2 types of people...those who FB and those who BTC. Each product targets a completely different client base.
I will also say that I believe those of us getting into Bitcoin now are absolutely "early-adopters". Maybe not to the extent of miners in 2010, but Bitcoin has hardly reached the point of widespread acceptance. I'm 41 years old and doubt I will live long enough to see a Bitcoin (or it's predecessor) world currency. I'm mining and buying now with the hope that my children or grandchildren might one day reap the rewards of my efforts once I'm gone.
I do have a FB account but don't really do the whole FB thing. I don't much worry about the privacy issue with it so much, it's just not my kind of thing. To me, FB feels a whole lot like the small-town gossip chain on world-wide scale...nothing about it excites me.
As far as the personal privacy issue, some people seem concerned with...welcome to the new age of technology! Facebook is just the first to be blatantly obvious about it. We can't put this Genie back in the bottle, it's only a matter of time before your privacy becomes public knowledge anyway...there's just no getting around it.
Unless you have somehow managed to completely avoid all manner of digital correspondence, someone out there has more info on you than you would like for any oppressive govt type entity to gain. Remember...someone is listening to and possibly recording all of your cellphone calls and texts, all of your emails, all of your forum posts...everything that you transmit over airwaves or through a modem can and (probably is) be monitored and recorded. It's just the world we live in from now on (+ the past 2 decades)...it's evolution and you can adapt and survive or fight it and die.