Media companies are seeing even more traffic coming to them from Facebook since the social network’s raft of changes began in September.

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Everyone with Facebook’s new timeline profile, take one step forward. Internet Explorer 7 users: Not so fast.

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Eye-tracking startup EyeTrackShop turned its eyes toward Facebook’s new timeline profile and came up with three observations on how users view it.

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Quit banging your iPad and hoping that Facebook’s new timeline profile will appear: You’ll have to wait until sometime in January.

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Ever since Facebook announced the new timeline profile at f8, people have been asking when business pages will get the same treatment. Should they? What will it look like? And when is it coming?

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Facebook’s changes to privacy settings have  resulted in a 93 percent drop in the number of status updates shared publicly — in the English language, that is.

The social network announced its move of the privacy settings to inline locations on August 23, but these changes took a while for people to get their heads around. Some of the controls didn’t show up for all users until the second week of September, which is represented in the chart by the green bar, the rate of status update sharing immediately declined as Facebook addicts opted-in to the update.

The major changes announced during the week of the F8 conference September 22 (represented the dashed red line) halted the slide, and sharing briefly increased. But changes gradually rolled out over the span of a month, and the continued slide in volume indicates that users confronted with the new options tended to adopt more stringent privacy settings.

It would seem that Facebook’s changes are curbing sharing. Our hypothesis is that it’s much more likely that this behavior is not going away so much as it is transforming, from status updates to “frictionless sharing.”

Applications and mobile access increasingly drive social sharing. As Facebook users read Washington Post news articles and listen to Spotify tracks on their iPhones, ticker entries broadcast their behavior to their friend networks.

This frees people up to share status updates only as they deem them fit for public consumption. Even as the new sharing methods enabled by open graph applications provide richer anthropological data, they are much more difficult, if not impossible, to collect for research.

Sharing services like bitly, Topsy, and ShareThis can facilitate understanding content consumption and distribution, but there’s no obvious substitute for harvesting unprompted consumer opinions

Readers, are you sharing more things privately than publicly on Facebook?

Guest writer Matt Pierson is the Senior Manager of Strategic Digital Analytics at Porter Novelli.

Editor’s note: The chart above includes a Hurricane Irene marker because the writer had thought that the privacy changes happened entirely in September, so the weather event was the originally proposed hypothesis for why public status updates dropped. I reconciled the facts in the story, but couldn’t remove Irene from the chart without spending more time in Illustrator than I have available for this.

The beverage industry is seizing the opportunities presented by Facebook’s new timeline profile, as Schweppes followed Mountain Dew’s lead by launching an application to help users create their cover images.

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Mountain Dew bills itself as an extreme beverage, and it acted extremely quick Thursday, offering its Facebook fans free, customizable images to use for the cover images of their new timeline profiles.

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Facebook is looking to land a counterpunch against Timelines.com, responding to the digital scrapbooking company’s claim that it owns the trademark to the word “timeline” by filing a countersuit and seeking to strip the trademark on the grounds that the word is generic.

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New Zealand is the site of the long-awaited debut of Facebook’s timeline profile.

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