DO NOT PUT all your eggs in one basket. My grandmother could say that because she dropped her shopping on the way home from the market twice when I was knee-high. I carried the eggs as a five-year-old on many occasions. Today, we have some eggs on their own shelf at Podcamp Ireland and a few others on Facebook. We would be ill-advised to populate the world with podcamp wisdom with the main source flowing from inside Facebook. Because if we did that, we would face the sneering glare of Seer ConorO and then we would inadvertently violate some sort of term or condition of Facebook service. We know that because our friends have stepped on Facebook land mines. If your address book or your Facebook group stretches beyond 50 names, you will encounter the trip wires on Facebook and without warning, you could be labeled as a spammer or worse--you could be shut down. This is happening several times a week to bloggers, marketers and authors who I know. Harry Joiner is the latest--read on and learn that Facebook is hardly a trustworthy Filofax. (Polite point for Paul Walsh, encamped inside the fenced meadow.)
James Durbin writes:
Here's a scary thought. Let's say you build your social network on Facebook instead of LinkedIn. You speak to clients, and add them to your list as you grow. You use the site to stay in touch with those clients, and then one day, you're banned. No reason, no recourse. Everything you built up is gone, and Facebook won't tell you why.
Don't think it can't happen. Lucky for Harry he was banned on the first day, and not after he invited his entire network to join.
This whole situation is mindboggling, and represents hubris of the first order. Maybe when you have 31 million members, you don't have to pay attention to your actual users, but my hope is that reporters catch wind of this story, do some digging, and start poking some holes in the Facebook mythology.
Right now - every Web 2.0 company is rushing to build widgets to grab hold of the Facebook community. I wonder what happens when one of them violates the Terms of Service while using their widget. Many companies are planning multi-million dollar widget strategies. With the kind of arrogance displayed in banning Harry Joiner, it won't be long before people start to question why they're investing time and money into a company that doesn't want them there.
What interests me is once you're banned, does Facebook vaporise your data? Or does Facebook keep it and mine it for itself?
Harry Joiner -- "Facebook Bans Recruiter"
James Durbin -- "All Your Facebook Are Belong to Us"
Mitch Joel -- "I am a Facebook spammer"
Paul Walsh -- "Using Facebook for Discrete Marketing"
