No Scrabulous in Syria?

A few months ago I started to Facebook in response to peer pressure. As of today I have 73 'friends,' and I am probably responsible for recruiting 15 of them to the site through my own pressure tactics. It makes little sense that I am on there at all, but I am enjoying having occasional contact with people that wouldn't happen through normal channels. Nearly all my FB time is spent playing Scrabulous with a few friends, and even some strangers.

Lately, however, I've been growing concerned about the ethics of Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, a paper multi-billionaire at the age of 23. In the past year he was hit with a suit involving the origins of the site. A story here elaborates on how he was once hired to program something called ConnectU with some other Harvard students. A few weeks after he pulled out of that job in January 2004, with apparently little progress, he debuted Facebook with many of the features of the planned ConnectU project. More recently, Zuckerberg and his mates introduced "Beacon" to Facebook, which tracked the activity of FB users at 'partner' sites, such as Fandango, for broadcast as 'news' back on Facebook. There has been a lot of criticism of the way FB users need to opt-out of this program, rather than choosing to opt-in (see this story). That is, the tracking would occur without the user's permission, and, more importantly, without the user's knowledge.

Finally, today I read this story about Sryria banning Facebook. Are my days playing Scrabulous on Facebook numbered? Will I finally decide to rid my self of social networking web sites? Stay tuned...