Is Facebook safe for business?

You probably thought I was going to start another rant, from an IT security perspective, about the dangers of using Facebook within a business setting, didn’t you?

However, in posing the “is Facebook safe?2 question on this occasion, I actually mean it more literally – should you be doing business on Facebook? The shallow answer is also the obvious one, and that’s a resounding yes. In fact, I’d go further by saying that you’d be daft not to be exploiting social media wherever possible in order to promote your brand and build a true customer community.

Nevertheless, if you dig a little deeper then the answer to the question becomes less clear-cut, as software developer Matt Kruse has discovered to his cost.

Social Fixer

Kruse is the man behind Social Fixer, which is an absolutely essential add-on for any Facebook user in my never-humble opinion. Regular readers may recall how earlier this year I waxed lyrical about changing the frustrating Facebook user experience by installing his free JavaScript app, which runs inside your web browser to make Facebook’s UI more customisable.

I’d go further by saying that you’d be daft not to be exploiting social media wherever possible in order to promote your brand and build a true customer community

Truth be told, I’m not even sure I’d still be using Facebook were it not for Social Fixer, since the app lets you make the ever-changing UI “usable” once again. I’m not alone here, either, given that over the four years that Kruse has been pushing his free application it’s garnered half a million users.

Now you may think that Kruse proves my point above, since he’s managed to build a very successful business (although he still refers to it as his personal side project) based in and around Facebook. His Facebook page for Social Fixer had close to 340,000 likes, which isn’t bad going – or to be more precise, wasn’t. I use the past tense here for a reason, because Facebook closed down his Social Fixer page – which Kruse used for support and passing news of new developments to users – without any notice early in September.

Don’t panic if you haven’t tried it yet, because Social Fixer is still available here.

Facebook has killed off only its community page on the social network, not the actual application. Of course Facebook could attempt to do that too if it really wanted, although I’m not sure how easy it would be: Social Fixer works within your local browser to customise the way it displays the Facebook interface, and therefore it doesn’t interfere with server-side Facebook at all.

Even so, some commentators have jumped to the conclusion that this was the reason behind the pulling of the Social Fixer support page: they claim it was only a matter of time, since it says quite clearly in the Facebook “Statement of Rights and Responsibilities2 that: 2You will not do anything that could disable, overburden, or impair the proper working or appearance of Facebook, such as a denial-of-service attack or interference with page rendering or other Facebook functionality.”

There’s no denying that Social Fixer does interfere with page rendering at the client end, since that’s precisely what it was designed to do.
Kruse insists that since his software isn’t an official app, and doesn’t employ the Facebook API, and he isn’t a registered Facebook developer, that he can’t reasonably be expected to be bound by the terms of service put in place for API developers.