

The Day Facebook Stole My Page - comberh
http://umcabango.wordpress.com/2010/05/08/the-day-facebook-stole-my-page/

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scott_s
Did he not read the email?

 _We also take down Pages that attack an individual or group or that are set
up by an unauthorised individual._

He admits several times that he is unauthorized to set up the page. The page
was also handed over to the official fan organization. I see no mystery.

~~~
tdavis
More curiously, he also admits several times that he had absolutely no
interest in the page and probably would have never visited it again. Besides
the lack of mystery, I also see a lack of anybody being hurt.

~~~
jrockway
The people that are hurt are future organizations that could benefit from an
unofficial fanpage. If users fear for losing their accounts (and therefore
friends), they are not going to bother advertising that organization by
setting up a fanpage. It's bad when people are afraid to _create_.

(But like I say in another comment below -- Facebook wants to make Facebook
like television. Consume, purchase, act. Creating and thinking is not good for
their advertisers.)

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unfletch
In summary, he violated Facebook's terms of service by creating this page, and
is accusing Facebook of "stealing" the page from him now that they've finally
decided to enforce those terms.

Facebook requires affirmation that the page creator is "the official
representative of this person, business, band or product and have permission
to create this Page." He said himself he's just a fan.

I've been as annoyed as anyone with all of the recent privacy issues at
Facebook, but it doesn't seem they did anything wrong here. Except maybe write
up some Terms of Service that aren't fan-friendly.

~~~
batasrki
Hold up, there is something wrong here. Yes, he did set up the page as "just a
fan". However, this page has been in existence for a few years and it's a page
that got really popular. So, Facebook only "enforces" their ToS when there's
enough popularity there to "monetize". It's bullshit and it needs to be
publicized as much as possible.

~~~
jarek
That's not bullshit at all. Upload a music video of a little-known band to
Youtube and nothing happens; band goes big, video gets 5 million views, is
removed for copyright violation.

Facebook can't possibly police every page, so they stick to policing those
that are largest or fastest growing. Get popular enough and you'll enter the
radar.

It's unfair in a way; but it does make sense.

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jrockway
It's too bad -- Facebook is obviously a good idea that people like, but
monetizing it is going to scare away all the users. By the time it becomes the
advertising haven that Facebook's investors need it to be, there will be
nobody left to click the ads.

Something I liked about the "old days" of the Internet is that the cost to
create a community was low enough for one person to support. Hence, it didn't
need to sell itself out to corporate interests or even have ads at all.

The problem with Facebook, though, is that people use Facebook because
everyone else uses Facebook.

~~~
hexis
I think it's still pretty cheap to create a community, if you're not trying to
get every person on earth to join.

~~~
jrockway
But the culture of doing so has gone away. No company or school would make
their own social networking forum; everyone just uses Facebook or Twitter.
Things were not always like that, though.

~~~
nostrademons
Remember Geocities? And Usenet before that? And Prodigy or Compuserve before
that?

These things tend to move in waves. Somebody comes up with a great new
communications platform, and everyone abandons their custom solutions for it.
Then the technology behind that platform becomes commoditized, the knowledge
becomes widespread, and people start coming up with small scale custom
solutions again. Then one of those custom solutions decides it wants to be
big, generalizes it's platform, people flock to it, and the cycle starts over
again.

Give it a couple years. I bet we'll see people creating their own social
networks again, in some nearly unrecognizable form.

~~~
jrockway
I hope!

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ericz
I didn't know that to create a Facebook page you had to be promoting it or
advertising something... so do you create a group to show you're a fan of
something? The Facebook landscape has become so convoluted.

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Raphael
You're supposed to make a group instead, but not everyone knows that.

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zan_shikai
There are enough reasons to beat facebook over the head. This isn't one of
them.

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nfnaaron
So fan sites - labors of love - have no place in Facebook as a fan page.

~~~
julio_the_squid
Sure, sounds fine! Why not make a normal website that isn't under the control
of some greedy corporation? That's what the internet is for, to me.

~~~
nfnaaron
The internet is for a lot of things. A social network is for socializing. Fan
sites or pages are a form of socializing.

Certainly Facebook is within their rights to prohibit this kind of thing. You
can even see why they'd want to do it: to make Facebook more friendly to the
paying customers (advertisers).

But it's an interesting question, how far down this road Facebook or any other
site can travel before the utility of the site is reduced to the point that
there aren't enough active users to attract paying customers.

------
Tichy
That kind of thing is pretty much standard practice. Presumably the real Banfa
Banfa stepped up and claimed the page.

