apparently, i'm facebook's Chat Terrorist #1

Normally, I'm loath to speak an ill word about Facebook. In my opinion, it's everything that MySpace should have been (classy, useful, functional) and does far more good than it does harm. That said, it's efforts to not become another MySpace have sunk to gestapo tactics. It being the day after Christmas, I've been talking to lots of friends online through Facebook and asking how their holiday was. I was talking to three of my friends at once, and suddenly this message pops up on my screen:

This is interesting, I think to myself, what exactly is going on here? "Misuse of Facebook's features?" What exactly is that supposed to mean? Oh, yeah, I made the strange assumption that Facebook was a social networking site, because if that was the case it would be totally fine with me communicating with people. ... But wait, Facebook IS a social networking site, so what's the problem? Well, it gives me a link to it's FAQ page, so I'll do a little research. Upon clicking the first couple relevants subheadings on the FAQ page, I get these results:

The numerous problems with this are as follows:

1. "You were given a warning to slow down." This most certainly did not happen. I was just suddenly blocked by the Facebook SS.
2. "Adding friends too quickly"???? Are the problems in the world today a result of people having too many friends?
3. "Facebook cannot provide any specifics on the rate limits that we enforce." What is this? The government from Atlas Shrugged? Getting punished for rules that you didn't even know were in place or how you're supposed to obey them?
   
4. "Ranging from a few hours to a few days." The minimum blocking time is a few hours?!? Even on the antiquated AOL Instant Messenger, blocking usually only happened for a few minutes.

The biggest irk is that this is incredibly inconsistent. I've carried on a greater number of conversations for far longer periods of time on numerous occasions before without this ever happening. What is the deal?

Next in the FAQ, I found this:

So their response to people using their messaging service as a chat client was to create a chat client.... which is ALSO not to be used as a chat client. They recommend Facebook Chat and neglect to mention that even that is only to be used twice per year to send a single message along the lines of "OMG! UR2CUTE! ROFL! WTF? IDK. G2G, TTYL!"

And that, my friends, is the end of this rant.