I see it as nothing more than an expression of the transitory and meaningless nature of most online relationships. Facebook is simply afraid of losing user base because the automated tools make it so easy to leave.
In Facebook's defense I must say that any web service or startup would probably complain if another service made it easy for users to destroy their account, especially if the content associated with the account was an indexable source of traffic, and destroying the account (unfriending) would possibly hurt other users.
How is that a defense? “Others would also suck“ is not a good argument to make.
Any web service should give the user full control of their data. Leaving should be easy, not hard. (And it is hard. I seem to only ever use the help pages of web services when I want to leave.)
The only reasonable way to have full control of your (personal) data is to have it a home, stored in hardware you own (or at least fully control). That means no Facebook and no Gmail, unless you trust them to not use you data for anything you didn't expressly specified.
I'm just saying that I can understand why they would complain. Sending a cease and desist might be a little extreme, but it seems only natural for them to complain.
"sends it to all of your Facebook friends" implies, to me, that every single one of your friends gets a wall post. That means a notification, which they have to click on to discover the content.
Farmville lets you send invites to all your friends. But I assume you have a choice about it - invite all your friends, or none, or choose some to invite. And it's always one of those "you have an X invitation" things which you can ignore because you know the content without looking.
Hey in yovile you gota send messages to friends for cash. So... What everyone winds up doing is sending "asd" messages to everyone on their friend list every day.
one feature I just found out about & feel compelled to share with everyone I encounter is that you can ban entire applications from your feed. you just click the hide button and you have the opportunity to ban either a user or an app. ban the app & you still see that person's updates, but nothing about their silly farm.
after a couple days zapping spam, facebook becomes about 100x more compelling.
I recall the grassroots "Delete your MySpace Day" from a few years ago. While it is likely that relatively few people actually deleted their accounts, the meme distributed the implicit message that MySpace might not be cool anymore. Since then, we've seen many articles about how it has become an online ghetto of sorts. Although Facebook is clearly more entrenched and better in so many ways than MySpace, it must be scared of such a backlash. Perhaps they are using C&D letters to quell such grassroots uprisings?
OP is exactly right. Facebook wants to be a one-way valve, much like Microsoft.
They also don't like the idea of people "polluting" the social graph, either by adding spurious contacts a la MySpace or by removing random nodes from the network.
Well removing is actually making the social graph better as most of the people removed aren't people that should have been closely connected to the user.
One problem is though I guess that there is no set way in which people decide where to cut off there graph. Some people will have friends of friends that they met one and work colleagues just because they work in the same building whereas others may limit to close friends and family.
Facebook explicitly stated that they will never inform people if you unfriend someone, this app does an end-run around that, of course they're going to disallow it.
In Facebook's defense I must say that any web service or startup would probably complain if another service made it easy for users to destroy their account, especially if the content associated with the account was an indexable source of traffic, and destroying the account (unfriending) would possibly hurt other users.