I obviously have a very skewed perspective on this, having worked heavily in policy enforcement just about everywhere I’ve ever worked, and specifically in application policy at MySpace, but I also think I have a very educated opinion as a result.

The app was a very cute, original idea, and I am one of many who installed it and removed friends for my free coupon (I’m curious to see if I actually get one). At the time, I was slightly uncomfortable with notifying people that I’d removed them from my friends list, but hey – I’ll take a free whopper.

Days later, Facebook pulled the application down for violating their policies. Of course it’s not ok to tell one user another removed them as a friend, that’s just asking for an argument to start “why’d you remove me, don’t you like me anymore?” It’s why people add friends on twitter, then mute them, they don’t want to offend anyone.  Violate policies, get your application yanked. Period. But…

Why was an application that violated policy live in the first place? There’s a pretty simple answer to that, and while I can’t claim I know it’s right, I’d bet that sales was heavily involved in this. The violation in this case was so egregious there’s no way people didn’t know it was violating policy (certainly, at some point, everyone everywhere has approved something to go live where they honestly missed a policy violation). But in this case someone specifically had to have said, “I know this is breaking the rules, but we should put it live anyway,” both on Burger King and Facebook’s side of things. People have let Burger King off the hook for this, but come on, they’re not stupid. I fully believe they were well aware they were breaking policy. It’s not a policy unique to facebook, after all, “don’t tell one user when another deletes them as a friend” is policy on pretty much every service on the internets.

The question for me, anyway, is why did Facebook take it down after allowing it to go in the first place. I personally didn’t hear any kind of outrage over the app breaking policy, most of what I read about the app was exceptionally positive. I really was waiting for some story somewhere to point out the very obvious violation in the application, but most people aren’t quite as much of a policy nut as I am. The media blowup didn’t happen until after Facebook pulled the Burger King app.

So…why risk the PR mess and yank the app? There’s something to this story that we don’t know, and I don’t know if we ever will. But I can’t imagine Facebook deciding to take the app down after it had received so much pickup unless something happened, somewhere. Someone realized it was violating policy, someone threatened them over the privacy issues, Burger King beat Facebook at foosball….something. Enough people had the app installed, and it had gotten so much press attention that there was no way it could be pulled without tons of people noticing.

Ultimately, I’m glad it was yanked, and don’t believe it should have been approved at all. Companies need very clear, very specific policies about this sort of thing, and they need to enforce them. I kind of equate “waiving privacy policy for dollars” to “bribing a cop to get out of a speeding ticket.” Wouldn’t you question why a cop let a guy go who was driving 90 mph, and ticketed you for driving 45 in a 40? There isn’t all that much difference in my mind.

Just play nice with each other. Sites need to make the rules clear, and developers need to follow them. I’ve had people say to me more than once “but the rules don’t apply to me, right?” Rules are rules, no matter who you are or how large your pocketbook is. Until everyone gets to that point (and facebook’s hardly alone at this), this is going to keep happening.

I’ve been blogging for a long time. My LiveJournal creation date is in early 2002, but I’d kind of started a bit before that in a different form. Like many people, whatever personal webpage I was working on at the time had an “about me” section. The “about me” would turn into a personal blog, entries in reverse order and all, and was updated almost as regularly as the rest of the site.

Before that, I had a .plan file on my VAX account. The updates there were closer to status updates on Facebook/MySpace, or Twitter blabberings, but even there, I would put basic info like “in class.” I didn’t keep the old entries, though (which is technically required to hit the definition of a “blog”).

Over the years my blogging has become much less personal, I’m sure in large part due to the fact that just about everyone’s online these days. I mean…my mom reads my Twitter. Weird, right? Not bad, just strange. The Internet was my world.

The majority of the entries in my former blog would be locked to friends-only, and would be extremely personal at times. I was a master of friend lists, and would post to different people depending on the topic. I trusted that privacy. I don’t anymore.

I very rarely see people blogging like we used to. It’s a necessary thing, of course, we were regularly talking about things we didn’t want the world to know. Not a good idea to put private information online these days.

I do miss it, though. I was friends with every single person who read my blog, and truly valued their comments and feedback. These days, I have nearly 1,000 followers on Twitter, and damn if I know half of them.

Our tiny Internet community exploded. It’s different, sure, but I’m very happy to welcome everyone on board. This is just the start – the next five years online are going to be amazing. And I for one can’t wait to see what happens.