DISQUS

It's a bit late now, but I think the more appropriate term is not "friend", it's "contact". Adding someone to my friends list, to me, means little more than adding their email address to my contacts list. My genuine friends are all contacts, where possible, but not all of my contacts are genuine friends.

Fair enough to do it, IMO, but there ought to be some profit-sharing.

This is what Blizzard does with WoW addons, its equivalent of applications: if a WoW addon becomes so universally popular that most people who have at least a few addons installed, have that one, they might make it part of the basic game UI. Given there's no financial relationship between WoW developers and Blizzard, the developers tend to not mind much. Also to some degree it's a recognition of having "made it".

In the case of Facebook though, it's clear that many application developers--all, in the case of the invite-spamming applicrappies--are in it for the bukkz. Since most of their applications are useless by definition, they won't make it into the base UI.

On the other hand, the applications of greatest usefulness are, broadly speaking, intended by their authors to fill a need, to do something Facebook does not do that they believe it ought; and it turns out, in the cases we're talking about, that they are correct. Such authors can, like the WoW addon authors, consider themselves vindicated and complimented. They weren't making money out of it anyhow.

So this only adversely affects applications that are actually useful, and on the other hand, are somehow capable of driving advertising revenue or something to the author. In which case, IMO, Facebook really ought to have the right to subsume the addon, but the responsibility to share the revenue gained thereby with the author. This maintains the incentive all around, for all parties concerned.

No, it's a very bad solution, for the same reasons the No Fly list and the No Credit lists cause vast amounts of inconvenience to anyone whose name even partially matches the ostensibly "guilty" person.

A sex offender (remember how broad that category is) ought to have the same right to innocuously use Facebook as anyone else does. The same way they may buy bread from the 7/11, or drive on the road, or use the telephone network. Any problem deriving from a sex offender using Facebook would be due to their commission of some kind of offensive or annoying behavior through a Facebook service, and at that time it would be appropriate to suspend or ban them. No complaint, no suspension.

Facebook ought not set itself up as a judge of its users' personal morality prior or external to any use of Facebook's facilities. Persons convicted of fraud probably pose a greater danger, especially fraud perpetrated on friends and family, and no-one's talking about that.

It's Facebook's responsibility to follow up on complaints it has received, not to pre-emptively try to match its databases with governmental databases. If jurisdictions want to forbid sex offenders (or other categories of offenders, although again, sex offenders seem to be the only ones brought up in this context) from using Facebook, they certainly can, and if the offender is discovered breaching this condition, they can be punished for it.

It's not just unnecessary for the Facebook company to try to do this, it's actually stupid.

Their practice of notifying me of the mail but not sending me the actual mail itself is very annoying and counterproductive.

I suspect the "real" appearance of her character is much less pretty. Hey, if you could choose to look like anyone in the world, Missy Peregrym is a good choice!