You have a point as far as ownership of the site goes, but I'm going to strenuously disagree with your second paragraph.

You may not be a picture person, but many of my friends are. We have hundreds of pictures of us doing silly things in silly places, at parties, at weddings, graduations, traveling, etc. This is what we look like as we move through life, and all of them are valuable keepsakes of our time together, and various stages of our lives. Amassing photos is useful and wonderful.

It's also not fair to imply the poster doesn't have friends or a network outside of facebook. He or she may have a great network, but facebook makes communicating with that network easier & more fun. I mean, that's the point, right? There's nothing wrong with that at all.

I like pictures. However, I keep them in ~/Photos (which is backed up nightly to my Bingodisk). That way they're mine... and nobody can take them from me if I spam facebook.

If I want to share them, I use iWeb to make a nice-looking page.

That assumes he wasn't doing anything wrong, and they blocked him in error.

If he was spamming, trying to amass 'friends', I'd say that is doing things the wrong way, and concentrating on real friends is a better plan.

We don't know that any spamming was involved. While concentrating on "real friends" is certainly a fine thing to do, if he were, say, a musician in an urban area, he could easily have 1000+ useful contacts, including fellow musicians, promoters, fans, his old college buddies, immediate and extended family, coworkers, and, of course, the "real friends."

Different people use facebook for different purposes. I completely agree that spamming strangers is not so good. However, simply having many contacts/friends doesn't seem so bad.

It's all in your definitions. I define "friend" to be someone you know properly. You can't know 1,000 people. Sorry, but that just doesn't happen. Apart from on social networks of course, where 1,000 friends is nothing.

That's fine for you, and I tend to agree with you and refuse requests from people I don't really know, but it strikes me as the height of arrogance to define how others should use a social network based on your own preferences and preconceptions.

If you're using a social network to build an email list, or to amass as many people as possible for some purpose, that's probably what Facebook objected to. There are other ways to build email/contact lists.

I didn't say it was not the way they should use it, it just seems like this is probably the issue...

Yeah, people on social networks have an interesting definition of "friend". To me, a friend is someone who I interact with regularly. To users of social networks, it's anyone that you have perhaps maybe heard of or seen in the hallway. I used to use Facebook, and people I didn't know added me as a friend. I reciprocated ("yay, I have a new friend") but still never interacted with that person.

Now I don't bother with social networks. I have contacts that I keep in touch with regularly (mostly on IRC), and if I need a drinking buddy or a job I have no trouble finding it.