Yesterday I wrote about x and the issue surrounding the generation of click revenues from bots on the Facebook eco-system.

Today Erik has posted much more detail about his Facebook interactions.

What I like here is that Erik is certainly not telling people to absolutely not use Facebook, but he is cooly and calmly laying out his experience and asking you to make your judgements with full facts and your eyes wide open. I’m impressed by that and it shows his maturity.

It’s also hard not to see that Facebook are trying to help resolve the issue. What is clear though is that they have a lot of bureauchracy and processes they need to satisfy - which is a) typical of a large organisation, but b) also typical for a company that is seeking to do the right thing. This second point is important. These processes allow them to be fair to their users and to themselves. Everyone is (or should be) treated equally and to the same level - the process will enforce that as long as it is followed. This does mean that they tend to move very slowly and cannot necessarily respond with the speed that we would sometimes like.

Given the amount of traffic that the Facebook servers must receive each hour of every day, it is understandable that they are asking the customer to provide the IP and time date information - it is much easier for them as they would potentially have this information much more easily to hand. After all they are monitoring their own systems, aren’t they?

The question of whether or not these are bots is still somewhat open (for me.) I would put money on there being at least some proportion of the traffic that is bot generated, but I don’t know if it is as high as they claim. This thought clearly occurred to Erik and his team too, as they concede that point in one of their responses.

The bigger issue I feel is the loss of faith. The advertising costs were not thousands of pounds but Facebooks inability to respond in a timely manner and seemingly act like a concerned provider has driven away a small customer. Will this bring down Facebook? No. Will it colour other peoples view of Facebook? Absolutely. Facebooks betting its future on being able to monetise its user base with advertising revenues. If people lose faith in the platform then they will delete their profiles and move away - at least when there is a perceived something to move away too - which means that the number of eyes on their adverts declines too.

We’ll just have to see how this play out over the long haul.