After just a week, 50,000 sites across the Web had already implemented the new Facebook social plugins announced at the company’s recent developer conference F8. By now, that number has no doubt grown significantly.

Update: Google now says: We initially reported that Urchin Software might require a patch to handle the new URL structure, but after some additional testing, it turns out no patch is needed. Urchin can handle both the current and new URLs.

Original article: Google is changing referral URLs on results pages. What up until now has looked something like this:

Google has decided to shut down its AdSense Referrals program effective the last week of August.

Lots of talk today about Google changing the terms of their referral units for Google Adsense. Good coverage by both Darren and Jeremy.

Lets take a little look at why they might have done this.

Using the wrong ad format could be the culprit as members of Google’s AdSense content network have experienced problems in getting referral 2.0 ads to appear.

One of the most frustrating things about RSS is not being able to track RSS subscription rates from source traffic.

There are other problems such as how people interact with your RSS content, but even being able to determine which sources of traffic result in subscribers would be a huge commercial advantage for bloggers, allowing them to focus their efforts on traffic generation strategies that will grow their business.

Testing has been wrapped up with Google’s referral beta, and the company plans to roll it out to all publishers in referral-supported languages.

Over at eMarketer, they’ve compiled some recent reports that suggest executives in business to business industries rely heavily on referrals and word of mouth, when making buying decisions.