My friend and online marketing wizard Leigh Himel has a great post today on Facebook, in the wake of a New York Times story about how a Montreal company (Weblo, which also runs a kind of virtual world by the same name) is helping Facebook users run ads on their own profile pages — something the social network officially doesn’t allow.
Leigh compares this phenomenon to the advice from the I Ching about how a network (i.e., Facebook users) should behave when confronted by an obstacle. She has the entire network-related excerpt on her blog, but I think the following excerpt is the most appropriate:
“5. Despite the importance of the obstruction, if the network is totally committed to the task it will attract collaborators with whom success may be achieved. (Resulting in: Unpretentiousness).”
How Facebook responds remains to be seen — but as Louise Story points out in the Times piece, it’s not going to look good if the social-networking site starts clamping down on its users so soon after the Facebook Bacon debacle.