"The simplest and perhaps most obvious thing that they could have done is to engage their audience before they made the change. I believe much of the anger of their audience has to do with the fact that it was "discovered" by The Consumerist - not clearly announced by the company in advance."

I was expecting a sensationalist, poorly-written article about Facebook's overcontrolling nature. I was pleasantly surprised: all the points were thoughtful.

The one that wasn't mentioned is the one that matters most in this case, however: the larger you are, the less you can do without being noticed.

This article focuses on strategies for preventing showdowns with users, which is the right approach since a company is never going to win these sorts of confrontations, whether it is Facebook, Digg or anybody else.

How do we know Facebook stumbled? Maybe their goal was to test the waters and see how much they could get away with, and they succeeded.