Facebook Faux Pas

Facebook. It’s a noun, it’s a verb, it’s annoying.

However, most people, between the ages of 12 and 50 have found themselves completely addicted to the social networking tool, without even knowing why. Most don’t go more than a day without logging on to check something out, whether it is the news feed (AKA gossip channel), pictures (AKA a tabloid of average people) or to answer the question, “What are you doing right now?” (AKA voyeurism to an extreme).

And I am not going to pretend that I’m exempt from the above descriptions. Guilty as charged. But recent investigations into user rights and privacy policies, as well as a general wearing down of the humdrum, not so interactive or intellectually stimulating content, that has me taking a tentative step backwards.

Beyond the fading fad of facebook’s tool is that fact that reports are coming out about those who have had contact with administrative people behind facebook–and it hasn’t been friendly. People are mad about the treatment they have received for doing, in their opinion, nothing more than using the social network, just like everyone else. Complaints include everything from the organization simply shutting down user’s accounts without notice, to banning from the network, to threatened legal action. So, is facebook trying to clean up things because users have abused the system or is facebook over-stepping its boundaries, trampling on the rights of some users in order to set an example so others fall in line?

Mrvnmouse has posted a blog on his website, blaming the fact that facebook no longer restricts their users to those registered under a specific university email address, which it originally used in order to have people register. The argument is that university students have the kind of maturity that wouldn’t allow them to flood the network with useless junk, fake names etc. He poses that facebook is going down in flames, and we need to see another networking rising up that restricts people who can register.

Yes…university students sit in classrooms, write essays, have to produce their own “work ethic” and self-discipline in order to graduate–affirmative. But mature? Having just exited that domain, I am not sure mature is the all-encompassing word I would choose to describe them. When I was woken up at 3 or 4am by my fellow “mature” academic students peeing on the side of my house…I reserve the right to suggest university does not equal maturity.

So, aside from such a debate of maturity in academics vs. an extended high school phase, is it the fault of the users, flooding the system or what have you, like the aforementioned blogger suggests?

Think what you will I suppose, but with the premise of Web 2.0 being that the users are just as important, if not more, than those who are behind all the computer code because it is about INTERACTION (which is not one-sided, like here’s a program a just use it, according to OUR rules), I would suggest that facebook is the one abusing its clients by not opening up the possibilities of its program to include an emphasis on the user.

So, is solution a new social networking tool? Twitter? LinkedIn? Something yet to be created?

Look out facebook…it’s on the way, and you may be forced get into ship shape or to faceBOOK it out of here.