I too have been going back and forth about this Facebook banning thing.

On the one hand: I think this is absolutely obnoxious on the part of Facebook to ban somebody like Scoble, Joel or yourself for using the service with people you aren’t friend with – or for having too many friends.

I myself have gotten the “spam” warning – and it’s made me afraid of using the site. Should I ever feel afraid of using a site if I feel I’m trying to earnestly engage?

On the other hand – I’m equally annoyed with the free-for-all on Twitter (which I assume is what Facebook wants to avoid). Every single day I get follows from obvious spam/marketers. It’s devalued the site/utility of Twitter. I can’t tell who is real on it anymore.

All this is to say – it’s a pickle with no real solution… at least – not an easy one in sight.

The discussion we have had about best practices has been ongoing – we discussed starting an initiative to gather many of these together but that never got off the ground. I do not think, it was, as you said above, “the proliferation of platforms and the inability of the members to agree on what the best practices might be, defeated us.” – what defeated the starting of such efforts was that no one had time to lead the effort.

Further, and perhaps more saliently, has been an ongoing semantic argument over the term ‘best practices’ and a misunderstanding by many that this means there is only one ‘way’ to do it best. That is an incorrect assumption – it is plural because there are many different practices that are right in many different situations. A discussion about what works best is very different from a mandate of how someone should use certain tools or processes – in fact, we advocate for the opposite – or rather, we believe that we should respect the way everyone chooses to use their social tools, but there are indeed some things (like opt in email, not spamming in comments and attributing quoted content) that are not only ‘best practices’ but indeed just the right thing to do.

That said, some people are now on a virtual witch hunt against everyone on twitter who aren’t following everyone who follows them. They arent doing this under the banner of ‘best practices’ they are doing this on some supposed grounds of a moral obligation – they might as well be telling us we aren’t praying properly…

Point being, I understand why some are against the discussion of best practices since it is so wantonly misappropriated, but that doesnt entirely destroy the value of the discussion or the sharing of what works for different people in different situations. We should not be doomed to repeat the mistakes of our past when others who have gone before us have already figured out so much…