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I’ve been reading with great interest the story of Harry Joiner, and have written a bit about it on my personal blog. He was banned from Facebook, after attempting to invite his 4,600 contacts through Gmail. There’s been a variety of press, and I’d expect it to attract mainstream media attention shortly. The question it raises for this blog is, what are your policies regarding Web 2.0 interaction on your site? If you have an address book function, do you let customers export it, if they need everyone who’s on a registry or a flower sending list? If you’re starting a social networking function on your commerce site, how carefully will you monitor usage? What about product reviews? Is it clear what the rules are? Do you publish everything, or do you take down reviews that are unacceptable? Are you willing to get into an online blog war about your rules? It’ll be fascinating to hear the viewpoints from industry participants over the next few months, at the conferences coming up.
–Josh
[Updated with comment I received from Harry] – Hi Josh,
Thanks for the coverage on this. I know that many of your readers are Shop.org members and “Internet Retailer” subscribers, so I’ll take a moment to clarify:
All I did was follow the instructions on the Facebook UI to invite my current contact list to join. Facebook never informed me of a limit. My understanding is that technology writer Robert Scoble has 4200 Facebook contacts — and last week, Mr. Scoble described Facebook as “the new Rolodex” and hyped its click-to-call compatibility with the iPhone.
Moreover, Facebook’s email address inhaler slurped up every single Gmail address I had on file — which just happened to be 4600 and change. Facebook even served up hundreds of photos of my contacts who were already members.
Honestly, it appeared to me as if everything was cool when I hit SEND. It was only when Facebook’s customer service rep gave me the boot in a misspelled email that I realized that I had been “F’d”
If Facebook had given me a limit, I would have obeyed it. No problem. I am a member in excellent standing on several online communities and social networks.
Note to Shop.org members: Even as this thing continues to gather steam in the blogosphere, Facebook has remained quiet on the matter. A mistake. Moreover, Facebook customer service was incredibly resolute about the permanence of their decision — even though they never gave me a Warning or an opportunity to atone for my actions.
It was like getting an instant death penalty for speeding on an unmarked highway.
Kind regards,
Harry Joiner
EcommerceRecruiter.com
As seen in “Internet Retailer” magazine
