An interesting story that has not recieved the level of exposure that is perhaps merits – Facebook has banned the commercial use of their status update facility, as reported by Mashable, amongst others.

This is an interesting move from the Internet behemoth – Twitter is currently a haven for commercial enterprise, and it’s clear Facebook don’t want to go down that route, don’t want their platform riddled with adverts and profiles set up purely for commercial gain. They seem to want Facebook to be more ‘pure’. This could stand them in good stead in the longer term – Twitter already risks being ‘ruined’ by the proliferation of spam and commercial accounts, there seem to be more of those than there are general user accounts at times! Facebook are obviously wary of this, and rightly so – it could be the death of Twitter.

However, it begs the question – how on earth will they police it? For example, I set my status ‘Had a great McDonalds for lunch, love McDonalds’. How could they ever prove I was paid to write that?

Obviously abuse of the system would be obvious, but small targeted advertising/sponsored update campaigns would be very difficult to spot. It remains to be seen if many people are pulled up on it – or can get away with it…

Another interesting facet of this is that with Facebook, unlike Twitter, (for most people at least) you actually know people that you are ‘friends’ with. Having lots of friends, and your status update reaching lots of people, would be attractive to advertisers – you are being paid to be popular!

This is perhaps the one realm where business enterprise and commercial awareness goes out the window, and you are actually rewarded by being ‘nice’, by having lots of friends. It’s almost sad that it is being outlawed.