What is the Purpose of Facebook, Exactly?

The risk of great success is the ease with which others can easily ridicule your blind spots.  And the larger the institution, invariably, the less human it becomes and easier it is to poke fun at the ridiculous things that android institutions do. Michael Arrington posted on TechCrunch yesterday about a flap on Facebook when users of an application called PackRat set up profiles just to play the game. They were literally “gaming” the system, you could say!  Here is the initial response from Facebook: Please note that Facebook accounts are meant for authentic usage only. This means that we expect accounts to reflect mainly “real-world” contacts (i.e. your family, schoolmates, co-workers, etc.), rather than mainly “internet-only” contacts. As stated on our home page, Facebook is a social utility that connects you with the people around you, not a “social networking site”. It is meant to help reinforce pre-existing social connections, not build large groups of new ones. If this is in direct contrast to what you expected as legitimate Facebook usage, I apologize for any confusion. This is simply the intention behind the site. Accounts that are used solely for the purpose of applications are in violation of our Terms of Use. Unfortunately, I will not be able to reactivate your account. Sorry for any inconvenience, but this decision is final. The draconian response reminded me of the story I wrote a few months ago of  Derek Blackadder’s union organizing on Facebook that resulted in the same kind of message – you are using the site in ways that we don’t approve, we are rescinding your account. Michael Arrington pushed back and got a more thoughtful response from a human being at Facebook who wrote, “we encourage users to add people that reflect their real-world connections and create trusted networks.” OK, sounds reasonable.  The reason why this interaction is important is not because of the last, reasonable statement, but, rather, the first robotic one.  It is a reflection, again, of the enormous chasm between social sandbox Facebook world and the faceless, corporate Facebook that is salvating at all of that personal data just waiting to be manipulatd and sold somehow so that they will have a vaible commercial model and be able to cash out.

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