When Facebook Closes Your Account
Posted by Nick O'Neill on August 10th, 2007 4:39 PMI was having lunch today with my friend Benoit who had a horrible thing happen to him. His Facebook account was shut down. Facebook sent him an email saying that he had two accounts (which he did but one was deactivated) and then proceeded to block him from logging in. If this happened to me it would be practically catastrophic. I now perform a large chunk of my business activities via Facebook.
It’s pretty crazy how rapidly Facebook has become a mission critical communication tool for me even though their message searching features are non-existent. If Facebook improves their messaging usability to be closer to Gmail I would probably end up performing the majority of my communication via Facebook. I’ve read around the blogosphere a number of other individuals that had their accounts temporarily blocked or completely shut down.
The real problem is that Facebook is almost as strict as the infamously protective ASmallWorld.com which will banish you to the big world without notice. It is extremely difficult to get your account back from Facebook and instead have to start rebuilding your account under a new email address. That can be extremely annoying. Have you had that experience?
August 11th, 2007 at 3:02 am
WOW! Close one’s account? What is wrong with having two accounts?
August 11th, 2007 at 7:09 am
There had been a lot of mails on Orkut as well as even on hotmail, specially when they had just started. These mails stating that if you are not using your account, they will deactivate your account. Might just be true for others, since they would like to save their server space for other active users.
August 11th, 2007 at 10:53 am
so how do you make money off facebook?
August 12th, 2007 at 9:35 am
This happened to me too. I run GridView an app with ~30,000 users and I was responding to support messages sent to me by using a form letter. After sending 7 they warned me not to do it. Then after 3 more, they disabled my account. I had to write to disabled@facebook.com and tell them I was only responding to messages from my users. I had to wait like 24 hours before someone responded and fixed my account back to normal. It that time I lost my profile pic while my account was disabled (witnessed on a friend’s account)