It sounds silly, but Fagin, actually brings up some fairly interesting points. He even went so far as to issue a press release. It begins:

There aren’t too many words that exist in Webster’s New Millennium Dictionary that conjure up more offensive and sleazy images than that of a “spammer.” It’s pretty much the equivalent of an online pickpocket or con artist.

Nonetheless, the first time David Fagin saw he was being blocked from sending friend requests on Facebook, as well as being labeled a spammer, he didn’t think much of it. Then, when it happened again, and he was informed that he was in danger of having his account deleted, he tried to resolve it by reaching out to Facebook’s support department – only to discover they don’t have one.

He also put out an opinion piece for AOL News, where he included the above screenshot of messages he received from the social network. “When Facebook labels you a spammer, the first thing you must do before you’re allowed to use the site again is go through a humiliating ‘checklist’ of boxes, in which you’re forced to admit you’ve been a bad boy and promise not to do it again,” he writes. “I, like many others, have no life, and sometimes spend hours a day on Facebook. So tell me, what is the point of a feature that hits you with dozens of friend suggestions every hour, then clamps down on you and treats you like a registered sex offender when you take them up on it? Isn’t what they’re doing, for all intents and purposes, entrapment?”

I’m no lawyer but getting rejected from the site and unjustly being labeled a spammer would almost seem a bit libelous. Nobody wants to do business with a spammer.

“Some might say ‘What’s the big deal? It’s just a stupid social networking site,” he says. But, when you’re talking about arguably the biggest online presence the world has ever seen, one that’s currently worth more than Microsoft, and there’s no way to reach a live human being, that might be something for the FTC and/or congress to at least think about.”

The worth more than Microsoft thing has been questioned, but that’s not to say he doesn’t have a valid point. Facebook is becoming more and more a directory of where to find a person or a business online. It’s huge and growing. “Half the world now uses Facebook as a primary means of communication,” Fagin writes. “With the other half surely to follow by next Tuesday. So, If you don’t think being threatened with banishment from Facebook is a big deal, try to imagine what it would be like to live in the ’70s and be accused of making phony phone calls and banned from using AT&T.”

He says (despite the link to let the company know in the message at the top) he was unable to reach a human about the issue. Some of these big Internet companies are notorious for the difficulty involved with getting them to hear complaints, even when said complaints are completely valid. Certainly plenty of people have had similar issues with Google, but Facebook’s whole existence is based on communication and friendships. It couldn’t hurt to be a little more open on the support side of things.

It’s not like they can’t afford a team to handle support in an adequate fashion. WebProNews and parent company iEntry aren’t anywhere near the size of a Facebook or a Google, but we do have millions of subscribers, and our modestly sized team (compared to these giants) is able to respond to any emails they get with support-related issues.

“It’s not just the support issue, either,” Fagin said. “Facebook is actively contradicting their own policies. On one hand, they tell you not to ‘friend’ anyone you don’t already know. On the other, the site constantly bombards you with names of people that Facebook themselves suggests you should ‘friend’, as you already have multiple friends in common. This also runs in direct contradiction with the spammer label. If everyone on the site is only supposed to be friends with people they know, then everyone is a spammer. As, no one knows two thousand six hundred and eighty-eight people, personally. Not even Donald Trump. Not to mention, Facebook wants you to connect with as many people as possible. That’s how they get their advertisers salivating; by everyone ‘sharing’ and ‘liking’ their favorite things. Only being connected to thirty-six people doesn’t really do much for the folks at Coke or Starbucks. But a thousand connections, who can all spider off to another thousand, now that’s viral marketing at its finest.”

Clearly, Fagin’s whole suit is simply to make a point – hence the $1.00 amount. The story’s probably already picked up enough coverage in the press for that point to have been heard. Whether or not it will have an impact remains to be seen. Facebook certainly has plenty of more pressing legal matters to attend to:

Technology companies like Google, Microsoft, Dell, and HP, and groups like FreePress, Media Access Project, Public Knowledge, and the New America Foundation want the US government to allow the development of devices that tune in unused spectrum for mobile broadband and other wireless functions.

The WIA says the use of white spaces will reveolutionize communications in America. "We are living through a critical juncture in communications history — a moment when technological innovation has the opportunity to dramatically improve our access to information and quality of life,” said Michael Calabrese, Vice President of the New America Foundation and Director of its Wireless Future Program, in a statement.

“Much as telephones, radios, and TVs revolutionized telecommunications in previous generations, white space devices will transform every aspect of civil society. White space devices provide an innovative platform for a new generation of technologies, services, and applications — they are the building blocks of a 21st century communications infrastructure."

Shortly after the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rejected a white spaces device in August (FCC engineers neglected to test the backup device, much to Microsoft’s chagrin) saying that it neglected to detect the presence of other signals, Google and the other tech companies formed the White Spaces Coalition in order to press their cause together.

Google’s membership in the WIA also follows the company’s formation of the Open Handset Alliance, a network of 30 tech and mobile companies looking to develop interoperability between mobile devices on wireless networks.

In addition to promoting the benefits of white space use, the WIA will work with government officials to bring white space use to reality. Google’s Washington Telecom and Media Council Richard Whitt says the company is throwing its support behind two bills introduced in both the Senate and the House of Representatives to open up white spaces for broadband development. Whitt says Google is also working with FCC engineers.

The major foes against all this openness traditionally have been the telecommunications industry giants like AT&T and Verizon (though they’ve been, at least superficially, suddenly on board), because opening up new avenues for broadband delivery opens up competition as well.        

But in the case of white space, the major opponent has been the National Association of Broadcasters, who fear use of the buffer zones will interfere with broadcast television signals.

Churches, too, have expressed concern that use of white space devices would interfere with wireless microphones, which operate in the white space frequencies also.

The WIA argues that such concerns are "myths," and offer five pages of myth-busters at their website. 

Both the major search engines have been executing some algorithm changes causing the usual ranking turmoil for webmasters and site owners over the last week.

While Google has made no formal announcement, the subtle mention of some tweaks associated to the new site links enhancement "twice the sitelinks" might have been the clue.

Site owners have been sharing mixed stories in the forums, with one reporting his listing dropped from being ranked 19th to outside 1000 – overnight. Others are suggesting their listings have been up and down in a matter of days. Here’s a couple of the other comments at webmasterworld:

"…My biggest site has been jumping from SERP#1 to SERP#-16-20 and back several times…"

"…my ranking is fluctating and in whole there is loss in visitors…"

Yahoo! on the other hand announced the changes with the release of its X-Robots-Tag support. According to their post:

"…we’ll be rolling out additional changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days. We expect the update will be completed early next week, but you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages in the index during this process."

At this critical time of year for most online businesses, these index and ranking updates will be an unwelcome surprise. Have you seen your rankings change over the last week? – if so, share your experiences.

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The Yahoo Messenger blog noted this preview release sports an entirely new interface. This draws from the Windows Presentation Foundation, Microsoft’s graphics subsystem in use with Vista.

The user interface and core functionality represent the areas of focus Yahoo centered on in building the client. Tab organization, enhanced emoticons, and the ability to skin individual IM windows list among the features.

As with other versions of Yahoo Messenger, this client can IM Windows Live Messenger clients. People can drag and drop contacts from Yahoo Messenger to the Windows Sidebar gadget and track them from there.

Plenty of work remains for Yahoo to do with the Vista version of Messenger. 64-bit support is on the list of future developments, along with almost every multimedia and messaging feature that isn’t a direct IM to another IM client.

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But fair is fair, and it is time for Adobe to face up to a glaring deficiency in its offering. Technical support for the product is woeful.

Mind you, what is available is pretty good. The online documentation for how to accomplish common tasks is clear and well written. The problem comes when that documentation doesn’t satisfy your needs as a user.

Let’s start with the main login page for the hosted product. The single "Help" link on that page takes you to a page titled "Macromedia Breeze Support Center." The first paragraph on the page has a link to "the Breeze Support Center."  Huh? The bottom of the page proudly proclaims that it was last updated on 25 July 2003. Maybe they could take a look at updating the company and product name. Following the offered link gets you to the "Acrobat Connect Support Center." There you will find the documentation that is available, with links to other resources. These include an FAQ with all of 6 entries (one of which is "How do I cancel my account?").

A search box at the top of the page lets you look through the online knowledgebase for the product. I did a blank search to see how many entries were available. I got 67 results. Then I noticed there is a selector for which product you want to search under. It has entries for: Acrobat Connect, Breeze, Breeze Meeting, Connect Enterprise Server, Acrobat Connect Professional, and Adobe Connect Events. You’d better be very familiar with Adobe/Breeze naming distinctions to run an advanced search!

Your next resource is a community forum. Unfortunately this contains only 14 entries, so you are unlikely to happen upon a tidbit matching your question.

No problem… Adobe has a page with telephone contact information specifically for "customers using Acrobat Connect in North America." I called it. I was greeted by a dispatcher who asked for my name and customer ID. I said I didn’t know my customer ID… how do I look it up? They asked if it was my first time calling support and I said yes.

"Oh, then you need to call Customer Service first and request a customer ID. Then you can talk to support."

So I was transferred to Customer Service. After asking me a few questions, I got assigned a customer ID. Then they transferred me back to Support. Once again I supplied my name and the new customer ID number, along with the name of the product I was calling about.

"What is your product serial number?"

"What? Where do I find a serial number?"

"It is on the CD label of your product."

"I don’t have a CD. I’m using a hosted service."

"No CD? Really? Hmmm… (pause, pause, pause) Okay, I am going to transfer you to a technical engineer. Please hold."

And at that point I stayed on the line for 25 minutes, listening to truly awful 70′s-era bubbly pop-jazz. I finally couldn’t take it anymore and hung up.

This is unacceptable, Adobe. I shudder to think of this scenario in a live event situation where something was going wrong. You need a way to deal quickly with event hosts and participants who are having troubles.

Part of the decision process in selecting a technology vendor involves support. ‘Nuff said.

(Reference link for children of the 70′s who grew up with the glory days of Saturday Night Live. Lily Tomlin frames things unambiguously for you.)

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The addition of new ways to target ads, and the introduction of new ad formats like video, make the two year old name ‘site targeting’ seem downright quaint. Since Google’s advertising clients can place their ads on subsections of sites, or even specific pages, the name change reflects this better.

That name change isn’t the only update Google made to AdWords. Advertisers have a new way to pay for the placements they set with the service.

Through the launch of cost-per-click (CPC) bidding, advertisers can choose from one of two billing options for placement advertising:

If the purpose of your placement-targeted campaign is to increase sales, leads, sign-ups, or other conversion-oriented metrics, you can select CPC bidding and pay when users click on your ads.

If you want to maximize impressions and increase brand awareness among your target audience, you can select cost-per-impression (CPM) bidding. And you can specify either the maximum price or the average price (with preferred bidding), that you’d like to pay for each click or 1000 impressions.

Google said the minimum bid for CPC pricing per click will be one cent, while the minimum bid for CPM will be 25 cents per 1,000 impressions.

We saw the effect of a spam detected by Symantec, where a link in the junk message resolved properly to Google. The spam link used advanced Google search operators to run an "I’m Feeling Lucky" query on Google.

The spammers crafted the link, its operators, and the destination site in such a way that the link would automatically go to the site. To the observer looking at the link, it appears to be a typical Google search with some extra query language related to the spam’s topic included.

That destination site had been registered at the beginning of October, with contact details that look phony. We’ll be surprised if orders placed through the site do more than grab some cash from the payment method before it vanishes from the web.

After we noted this story earlier, David Cawley of MailChannels dropped a note in the inbox. He pointed out how this misuse of Google’s advanced search and the "I’m Feeling Lucky" feature could have been much worse:

The issue is actually more serious than a typical spam redirect. For example, I could craft (a) URL to point to an attachment instead of a website.

Since many Windows users have their PCs configured to automatically open PDF attachments, it’s possible that it may have opened as soon as you click the link.

Cawley’s link did just what he said it would, triggering the launch of Adobe Reader and the opening of the destination PDF. His sample was a benign link to a whitepaper. A malicious link could deliver all kinds of nastiness to an unprotected machine.

Earlier today, we suggested Google may want to revisit their past consideration of doing away with the "I’m Feeling Lucky" link. It’s unique to Google among the major search engines. The feature’s luck may have run out now.

I’m seeing a few subtle and not so subtle changes in GMail tonight.

1) Quicker message loading

2) New graphics (the yellow type found in Google Reader) at the top of the screen for loading messages

3) New contacts manager which is very slick and a great upgrade

4) The ability to add an event invitation when composing or replying to messages.

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A question was posed by Joe Niederberger via 10Questions.com, and was voted up as an important issue. MTV said they would relay Niederberger’s question to Obama during a live dialog. Niederberger asked:

"Would you make it a priority in your first year of office to re-instate Net Neutrality as the law of the land? And would you pledge to only appoint FCC commissioners that support open Internet principles like Net Neutrality?"

Obama gave a resounding reply:

"The answer is yes! I am a strong supporter of net neutrality. And in case folks weren’t following exactly the question I just want to make sure everybody’s clear.

 "Right now the speed with which and quality of your downloads or links are the same if you’re going to the CNN or Time Warner website as if you were going to barackobama.com. But what you’ve been seeing is some lobbying that says that the servers and portals through which you’re getting information over the Internet should be able to be gatekeepers and to charge different rates to different websites and webcasts. So now what you’d have is, potentially, you could you could get much better quality from the Fox News site and you’d be getting rotten service from some mom and pop site. And that, I think, destroys one of the best things about the Internet — which is
that there is this incredible equality there."

"And people, if you’ve got a good idea and get a great website — Facebook, MySpace, Google might not have been started if you did not have a level playing field for whoever has the best idea. And I want to maintain that basic principle in how the Internet functions and as president I’m going to make sure that is the principle that my FCC commissioners are applying as we move forward."

Watch the video: