I've been singing Facebook's praises over the last few months, as it's enabled me to get back in touch with a large assortment of people, some of whom I thought I'd never get in touch with again. But it's not all roses.

Some idiots have been spamming the site recently, so they've brought in anti-spam filters. Which is all very well, but some of the spam filtering is punishing a lot of responsible behaviour. I got warned last night, presumably for one of the following:

1. Posting twice on someone's Wall in 6 hours, in both cases in reply to their post,

2. Posting two messages with vaguely similar content (the spam filter might have counted that under "repeated posts")

3. Mentioning an application that I have (the other person was discussing it with me, but the spam filter may have assumed I was spamming the person's account by "advertising" it)

I've backed up my contacts to cut my losses for if I do get banned, but it was a big scare to be threatened with a permanent ban for doing nothing wrong. However, it's perhaps more symptomatic of a general issue- you can't take any luxury for granted, because if a few idiots abuse it, blanket restrictions on it are likely to be deemed necessary because "that's life". However, I'd have to be unlucky to fall foul of this again, as it seems only a tiny percentage of legitimate users do so.

If Facebook dies a death in the near future, chances are it will be because of an over-reaction against idiots. If it isn't through too much anti-spam control, it may happen due to idiots abusing it for identity theft (bringing about such stringent privacy control that it becomes useless for social netowrking), or it may be banned/severely restricted because a minority become addicted to it. Addiction is a genuine problem, but most people I know just use it to keep in touch with people and regain lost friendships, essentially as a more interactive/sociable alternative to just emailing them.