When Facebook first announced the new look for the news feed back in early March, the social network made a point to let everyone know (a few times) that they would be rolling it out very, very slowly. That shouldn’t have surprised anyone, considering that’s the same strategy they’ve taken with the Graph Search beta, which launched back in January.

No point in rushing, we get that.

But Facebook is really taking their sweet time with the new news feed.

At the bottom of their about page for the news feed redesign, Facebook taunts those still living with the boring, old news feed of the past by letting us know exactly how many of our friends have switched over. Facebook did this with Graph Search as well.

Facebook tells me that 15 of my friends have made the switch. Neat. I have 609 total friends. That means that Facebook has given roughly 2.5% of my friends access to the new news feed.

Of course, some of these friends were simply given access, and other probably used the waiting list signup option. Although that little trick doesn’t seem to have worked the well, as commenters on previous articles on WebProNews about the new news feed confirm that they signed up for the waiting list immediately after it became available, and Facebook has chosen to bestow the new news feed on their friends, who didn’t sign up. Bollocks.

Anyway, this got me wondering exactly how many people on Facebook are currently rocking the new news feed. So I did an incredibly unscientific poll of a couple dozen people to find what percentage of their friends have the new news feed.

The average was just shy of 2.2%. Extrapolate my embarrassingly tiny sample size, and take into account Facebook’s billion monthly active users, and we find that about 2.2 million users are currently sporting Facebook’s slick new news feed.

I was just wondering why I had seen so little public bitching about the new news feed – compared to the bitching associated with every other change that Facebook makes. I thought that it may be that Facebook had finally delivered on a product that garnered unanimous approval – or at least the closest to it that Facebook is ever going to get. In reality, it just looks like nobody’s seen it yet. I guess that’s the point. Well, one of the motivations at least.