While this shouldn’t really come as any kind of surprise, Facebook doesn’t like Google+ treading on their turf.
Michael Lee Johnson, a self-proclaimed “Internet Geek, App Developer, Technological Virtuoso”, came up with a rather bold way to get more friends on Google’s social network- by creating an ad on Facebook. The ad (shown on right), states rather simply: “If you are lucky enough to have a Google+ account, add Michael Lee Johnson”, along with a photo of himself.
Johnson now claims Facebook has pulled his ad, and in fact all of his ads (the rest of which had nothing to do with Google+) and sent him the following message:
“Your account has been disabled. All of your adverts have been stopped and should not be run again on the site under any circumstances. Generally, we disable an account if too many of its adverts violate our Terms of Use or Advertising guidelines. Unfortunately we cannot provide you with the specific violations that have been deemed abusive. Please review our Terms of Use and Advertising guidelines if you have any further questions.”
Interesting that they cannot provide specific violations, right? CNet’s Chris Matyszczyk decided to read the Terms of Use and Advertising guidelines himself to determine what exactly they deemed so abusive as to disable his entire advertising account.
He does admit that Clause 6a of Facebook’s Advertising Guidelines states that “We may refuse ads at any time for any reason, including our determination that they promote competing products or services or negatively affect our business or relationship with our users”. Facebook may consider the mere mention of Google+ to negatively affect their business or relationship with their users. However, the language used here is that Facebook states they “may refuse ads”, not disable his entire account along with perfectly legitimate ads. Seems a bit harsh.
At the end of the day, one might question whether or not Facebook itself has actually turned this into something that will negatively affect its business or relationship with users. After all, Johnson didn’t say anything negative about Facebook in the ad or that there is any reason not to continue using them. It could be argued that such an ad is hardly negative to them.
Now, the publicity this story is getting, along with Johnson’s own Google+ feed (which already has over 1,400 people following) is putting a negative spin on Facebook’s policies. Johnson recently posted “The best thing I ever did was delete my Facebook account (now I’ve got more time to use Google+)”.
An interesting point to leave you with: Facebook’s own Mark Zuckerberg not only has a Google+ account, but has over 184,000 followers on Google+. That’s more than anyone else, even Google’s own founders combined. He hasn’t used it much, but apparently doesn’t have a problem being on both networks himself.
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