You can reproduce this by posting something, quite possibly something rude and offensive, on a friends wall, then defriending and blocking them. Blocking them means neither of you can see each other’s posts and walls, and neither of you can see the post. But it remains visible to anyone else who can see the former friends’s wall. Because neither of you can see it, neither of you can delete it either.

Is this a bug?

I would say that it is, and would log it as a defect were I working as a tester for Facebook. Techically it’s a missed requirement rather than simple coding error, but the potential unexpected consequence could be quite serious. There’s quite a lot of potential for malicious misuse of this.

“Alternatively, we might just be a bunch of trolls, because this did come from a comment the Daily Mail website”.

(Thanks to Mikko Hypponen on Twitter for the link)

The relationships we build and maintain through social networks are far more valuable to us than the networks themselves.

Twitter ignores this at their peril.

I really detest Facebook’s walled-garden approach. The most valuable thing about any internet-based community site isn’t the site itself, it’s the relationships you build and maintain through it. I don’t want those relationships wholly owned and controlled by an increasingly creepy corporation that’s only interested in monetising our mutual personal data so they can sell it to advertisers. Facebook has sucked the life out of far too many forums and blogs, and while many forums have their own problems, that can’t be a good thing. With more and more external websites morphing into detestable Facebook ‘apps’, they’re now actively trying to eat the rest of the web.

The only reason I’ve got a Facebook account at all is because there are people who have no significant online presence outside it, and I don’t want to lose all contact with them. I’d much rather a few more people who want to contact me follow me on Twitter, or comment on my blog. Or just use old-fashioned email.

It’s been said that Facebook was created by people with Aspergers syndrome. Whether this is true or not, it does appear to have belief in the geek social fallacies written all over it, especially #4 in that list. That does seem to be a root cause of a lot of the site’s problems.

In an ideal world, a combination of Twitter and blogging does everything I want out social networking. But blogging in particular is quite hard work if you want to build an audience. Facebook’s greatest strength is that it provides a ready-made audience for those who don’t have an awful lot to say. Unfortunately that’s also it’s greatest weakness, hence the vapidity and over-sharing. I always feel bad when I have to mute, unfollow or in the worse cases block people because they’re friends-of-friends in real life. Just because we like the same music doesn’t necessarily mean we have anything else in common.

So what to do? Should I hold my nose and use Facebook sparingly, just to keep in touch with those who are active nowhere else? Or should I try to encourage more people who actively want to interact with me online to follow me on Twitter or read my blog? Should I be spending more of my online time on existing communities like RMWeb and Dreamlyrics? Or should I put my faith in alternatives such as Google+ or even Diaspora?

You should be asking yourselves the same questions.

The suggestion is that blogs and social media makes musicians more accessible to fans, and this is somehow a bad thing. I think his real beef is the increasing redundancy of the music journalist as middle-man.

Anyway, I think the whole concept of the “rock star” is overrated. Some of the most sublime music I’ve heard over the past decade has been made by those who, when I’ve got to meet them have turned out to be quite down-to-earth people. The trouble for music journalists, of course, is that they’re less interesting to write about than to listen to. Unfortunately the ‘rock star’ myth is all to often an excuse to justify the sorts of behaviour that no ‘normal’ person would get away with, and ends up with the glorification of sleazy figures like Pete Doherty.

As I’ve said before, in recent years we’ve seen an wider gap between the creative artist and the showbiz celebrity, so it’s the largely talent-free slebs whose antics fill the gossip pages of the tabloids, while musicians are left in peace to do what they’re good at, which is create great music.

And I really don’t have a problem with that.