Be Warn! Facebook disabled accounts!

Be warn! Facebook does disabled accounts if you violiate their terms of use. Usually Facebook will send an email to warn the user of the violation

Some of the common reasons for disabling accounts are :

1. You didn't use your real name

Facebook requires all members to use their real name when registering an account. This is their way to reduce spammers. It is to ensure that the users on this social network is geniune and also to ensure their advertisers of the reliability of their data.

2. You posted too many messages on a wall or in a group

Apparently, there are some whose accounts are being disabled for “spamming” when they sent too many messages out to 100 over friends. Some were posting too many duplicated messages which Facebook suspects the activities as spam.
There are also those who tried to befriend others who are not really their friends and being reported to Facebook as spammer.

3. You are under eighteen years old

According to one report a user’s account was suspended when they suspected her of being under 18. She was required to enter a work email address to prove her maturity, at which point her account was reinstated. [note: other users have pointed out that being under 18 is fine if you’re part of a High School group, though underage home schoolers have been told to bug off]

4. You wrote offensive content

There was a lady who has been constantly spammed by another guy. She was so upset that she wrote to him to f*** off and she reported him to Facebook. However, she was even more furious when Facebook disabled her account instead of the spammer’s!

5. You scraped information off Facebook

Big NO NO! Don’t try to use applications to scrap information on Facebook.

6. You advertise your business on their Marketplace

For some reasons, Facebook do not allow do not allow users to advertise services or businesses using the Marketplace feature.

If for some unfortunate reasons, your account has been disabled, you can try writing a nice email to the following email

info@facebook.com
privacy@facebook.com
login@facebook.com
appeals@facebook.com

I do come across many users whose account has been given back to them. But you might need to wait for a few days before they will respond.

Is CIA spying on you?

One of the Web’s entertaining conspiracy theories about Facebook is the idea that the CIA helped found Facebook as its latest information-gathering tool. With recent outrage of privacy invasion of Facebook’s advertisement technology, this theory resurfaced and there was another round of fear and concerns on privacy invasions.

This conspiracy theory was first sparked off when the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) started using Facebook as a platform to recruit potentional employees into its National Clandestine Service in December 2006.


The CIA's Facebook page (login required) provides an overview of what the NCS is looking for in a recruit aim at potential college-aged applicants. U.S. citizens with a GPA above 3.0. The NCS, one of the four directorates of the CIA, was established following 9/11 to gather intelligence from sources both domestic and abroad. However, both Facebook and CIA deny the accusation. They claimed that CIA had setup the Facebook profile mainly for recruiting and marketing purposes, CIA has no direct access to member’s profile.

Facebook's privacy policy states that outside companies sponsoring groups don't have access to personal information or profiles. However, it does say that information may be shared with "other companies, lawyers, agents or government agencies," in order to comply with the law.

There are also theories that outlines the supposed CIA effort and tries to connect dots between the CIA, the U.S. Department of Defense and Facebook’s investors.

It was known that Facebook's first round of venture capital funding ($US500,000) came from former Paypal CEO Peter Thiel. Author of anti-multicultural tome 'The Diversity Myth', he is also on the board of radical conservative group VanguardPAC.

The second round of funding into Facebook ($US12.7 million) came from venture capital firm Accel Partners. Its manager James Breyer was formerly chairman of the National Venture Capital Association, and served on the board with Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm established by the CIA in 1999. One of the company's key areas of expertise is in "data mining technologies".

There can be many associations between Facebook and CIA, however Facebook is only as powerful as the information people voluntarily add to it. If you’re worried about privacy, don’t create a profile on Facebook, and if you must have one, omit any aspects of your life and actions that you don’t want others to know about.

Is Facebook a real platform?

Will Facebook become the standard social networking platform on the net? When Facebook launched it’s new platform for developers, there are some who doubted if they can really make money on Facebook. With many uncertainties ahead, some businesses are hesitated to used Facebook as their marketing tools. There are concerns that Mark Zuckerberg might sold off Facebook and that the future of Facebook is uncertain.

To date, Facebook have already launched a Facebook Platform for BlackBerry Smartphone, followed by iPhone-specific version of their site, http://iphone.facebook.com. Admob, a leading mobile ad publishing solutions company already announced that their publishing solutions are optimized for Facebook.

Mike Lazaridis, the Co-CEO of Research In Motion is quoted saying

“Facebook is one of the fastest growing web destinations among BlackBerry smartphone users and it has become an important element in the evolving fabric of personal communications.”

With close to 30 Million users worldwide on Facebook and growing at a rapid rate on a daily basis, we can expect to see more and more integration of Facebook into the business arena. We can see the big players like Ernst and Young, Johnson and Johnson, Coca Cola already in the lead to integrate Facebook into their marketing strategies. Blockbuster has also built an application that lets Facebook users search thousands of movie titles, create lists of movies they want to see and share movie reviews.

While some are already starting to make money on Facebook, some are still experimenting their applications. The real profit will only be seen in the near future when Facebook platform is fully exploit.

So will Facebook be the real platform? It still seems early to determine at this point in time but certainly a lot of businesses and investors are already looking into ways to tap on the hugh members on Facebook. So if you are not at it, you might be losing out this big pie!