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Facebook’s Faceplant
(Originally published as “How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook,”
InformationWeek,
November 26, 2007.)
Facebook’s “platform” strategy has sparked much online debate
and controversy. No one wants to see a return to the miserable
days of walled gardens, when you couldn’t send a message to an
AOL subscriber unless you, too, were a subscriber, and when the
only services that made it were the ones that AOL management
approved. Those of us on the “real” Internet regarded AOL with
a species of superstitious dread, a hive of clueless noobs waiting
to swamp our beloved Usenet with dumb flamewars (we fiercely
guarded our erudite flamewars as being of a palpably superior
grade), the wellspring of an endless geyser of free floppy disks
and CDs, the kind of place where the clueless management were
willing and able to — for example — alienate every Vietnamese
speaker on Earth by banning the use of the word “Phuc” (a
Vietnamese name) because naughty people might use it to evade
the chatroom censors’ blocks on the f-bomb.
Facebook is no paragon of virtue. It bears the hallmarks of the
kind of pump-and-dump service that sees us as sticky, monetiz-
able eyeballs in need of pimping. The clue is in the steady stream
of emails you get from Facebook: “So-and-so has sent you a mes-
sage.” Yeah, what is it? Facebook isn’t telling — you have to visit
Facebook to find out, generate a banner impression, and read and
write your messages using the halt-and-lame Facebook interface,
which lags even end-of-life email clients like Eudora for compos-
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