Wait a second. It seems that everyone is missing one key element of the latest faux-controversy about Facebook. What is Jason Calacanis doing back on Facebook?
Calacanis kicked off the latest bitching session today by posting an email he sent to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg. In it, he chastises the social network for not having an opt-in policy for its new Groups feature. But wait — how would he even know how the new feature works? Didn’t he say over and over and over again that he was done with Facebook?
He deleted his account – on video even! And yet, a few weeks later, he was still there. At first he made it sound like a third-party site reactivated his account, but then he clarified to say that he had logged in to Facebook Connect to clear something up and believed that reactivated his account. Facebook said that wasn’t true, and that he must have pro-actively cancelled the deletion request. Calacanis went quiet after that.
We would have thought that since he was so adamant about it, he would have immediately deleted his account once again. But apparently not. As you can see now, about a month later, in August, he left this Wall post to his followers:
Note: if you stumble on my Facebook page it’s in hybernation mode. I just don’t trust the folks at Facebook with my data.
He’s so paranoid about Facebook, yet he decided to keep his account active? Weird.
Even weirder? A couple weeks later, he posted again on his Facebook Wall. This time, a link to his latest rant.
So apparently, Calacanis is done with Facebook except when it can help him promote his content. Or when it can be the fodder for new content, as we’re seeing today.
We agree that it is fairly lame that people can be added to any group. But that’s not a privacy issue — Calacanis’ (and Mike’s) own friend added them to this group! It’s just lame because of the insane amount of spam that can result from unknowingly being added to a group.
But this shouldn’t have been an issue Calacanis ever encountered. He deleted his Facebook account months ago, remember?
Update: Calacanis has responded.
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...
“Jason McCabe Calacanis was CEO and co-founder of Weblogs, Inc., a network of widely read blogs including Engadget – ranked # 1 by Technorati, Joystiq, Autoblog, and Blogging Baby. Founded in January 2004, Weblogs, Inc. became a wholly owned subsidiary of AOL in November of 2005. Calacanis maintained editorial supervision over Weblogs, Inc. as a senior vice president of AOL. In June 2006, Calacanis relaunched Netscape, the iconic browser owned by AOL and was named its general manager....
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