November 2007
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Link bait title of the day: Facebook Declares War on the Blogosphere

Link to Link bait title of the day: Facebook Declares War on the Blogosphere

How do you get attention when you feel you've been wronged? A time-tested technique: make wild unsupported claims and/or rush to ridiculous conclusions. ("The sky is falling.")

A blogger who uses the pseudonym "Jon Swift" reports that Facebook deleted his profile because he didn't include his real name.

As best I can tell, the company is just enforcing their terms of service on a single blogger. That's hardly a war, no "declaration" has been made, and (even if both were true), deleting accounts does not affect the blogosphere in any way.

Would a straightforward title have gotten the attention of Robert Scoble, or sparked Dennis Howlett to call Facebook Orwellian? Perhaps not, but perhaps so.

Even without exaggeration, the issue draws sympathy from Stan Schroeder at Frantic Industries blog:

Do a search for Jesus Christ on Facebook. Or Flash Gordon. Or any other obviously fake name. You’ll instantly receive hundreds, if not thousands, of results.

If you can’t uphold your own terms of service on everyone, why do it on the selected few? I don’t really see how Facebook can consistently and systematically check the truthfulness of user provided profile data.

Good point.


Speaking of Facebook, here's my gripe: requiring date of birth strikes me as an invitation to identity theft. Hmm; wonder how that would play as a headline?

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AOL-owned blogs have impressive year-over-year growth

Link to AOL-owned blogs have impressive year-over-year growth
Data from Compete.com.

Yesterday, Henry Blodget pointed out that blogs are among the bright spots for AOL Time Warner. He showed Compete.com's data for TMZ (gossip), Engadget and the newer BloggingStocks.

I just wanted to add that there are several blogs from the AOL-owned Weblogs Inc. network ("WIN") that have more estimated US monthly visitors than BloggingStocks: Autoblog, StyleDash (fashion), Joystiq (games) and ThatsFit.

(I wouldn't read too much into the monthly drops, as those could easily be wrong.)

About the source (emphasis added):

Compete triangulates multiple data sources, including ISP, Panel & Toolbar to estimate U.S. traffic.

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