On the one hand, I cannot help but feel for this person - Facebook, without an explanation, did significant damage to this person's career. At least that's the way he paints it (though he mentions a rule in his mailbox that deleted mail from facebook automatically, so there might have been a warning and all that - we'll never know). On the other hand, well, that is precisely what some people warned us of - give a sin…
Folks have tried starting alternatives to facebook: I think the real problem is that facebook is more similiar to a phone company that only connects its users to others that have the same phone company. It was the only game in town for a while, so this has made it into a near-monopoly. If facebook was required to have some level of across-platform access, this might level the playing field and give us actual choice.…
That would be very interesting, and I think it would be a good idea. But I imagine it would be rather hard to pull of on the technical side, even if Facebook full-heartedly supported such an effort, and I don't want to begin to think of the kind of pressure we would have to put on our politicians to create such a law without making humongous mess out of it.