Facebook is not the Devil

There is so much FUD in this NYTimes article about Facebook, I had to retort.  The article is full of troll-level misstatements, I’m almost thinking it’s a parody piece:

• Facebook’s numbers are going up.  They have more users and more unique views every month.
• They said an exodus happened when they pulled Scrabulous down.   Hi, Scrabble is a copyright-protected game.  How would you like it if your work was copied and given away for free?
• “Postings that seem private can scatter and slip unpredictably into a sort of semipublic status.”    Hahaha, if you screw up and post something in a public forum, that’s your own fault.
• “One day, on another Web site, she responded to an invitation to rate a movie she saw. The next time she logged on to Facebook, there was a message acknowledging that she had made the rating.”   That would only happen if she went to the review site through Facebook.  No application can post to your profile without explicit authorization.
• The other complaints center around personal information used for advertising (Running the #3 website in the world probably requires a fantastic amount of money) and that the site seems stale (That’ll happen when you have 250 MILLION users).

There’s always a trend of  “predicting the demise” of a heavyweight.  I don’t love Facebook, I wouldn’t mind if something better came along but I’m not expecting it to disappear anytime soon.