Looking at this in the context of Facebook's privacy battles of late, should we be more worried about the data Facebook will collect about users' political or policy preferences?

If you were the RNC, would you want to target fence-sitters for by congressional district? If you were Facebook, would you refuse to allow your ad platform to be used in such a way?

I agree this effort from Facebook has miles to go. If this is meant to be yet another of Facebook's extortion efforts to extract ad revenue (for Facebook) or promote the developer ecosystem (applications for pages) then this effort will ultimately deserve our scorn.

On the other hand, I'd be supportive of Facebook creating for the community the kinds of applications that reward considered debate over hit and run sniping.

I'd love to see Facebook seek out partners for the advancement of reasonable ideas to solve common problems. The chaos of individual fan pages for members of the house and senate won't help much in that regard, however.

Another reason the trend isn't as visible in the quantcast data is that they aren't the same time period. The netratings data for marketwatch shows a spike similar to what compete shows.