This morning I was trying to send one of my friends a message on Facebook and I got the following message: Warning! Your account could be disabled. You are using this feature to spam other users. Continued misuse of Facebook's features will result in your account being disabled. If you have any questions or concerns, you can visit our FAQ page. Really? And here I was thinking that I was just replying to messages from friends and siblings. I didn't think I had been spamming my friends so I looked to see how many messages I had sent. In the last week I had sent 5 messages, each of which had multiple replies. This seems about the average for the entire time my account has been open. When I took a look at the Warning - Blocked from Using Feature page one of the answers to the FAQ is "Please note that even if all of your conversations were legitimate interactions with friends, our message service is not a chat client, and should not be treated as such." Instead they suggest using their awesomely crappy chat feature. Which I suppose works okay if the person you are messaging is online at the time. It seems that the otherwise the logical alternative of sending a message should be limited to when you are dying or subject matter of a similar subject matter.
To be fair to Facebook by the time this message was finished I was no longer tagged as a spammer. However, this does not negate the fact that they need to tweak their algorithm for deciding who is a spammer, and they really need to do a better job at pointing out that the message system should be used in emergencies only. I guess I will have to go back to dark ages and (gasp!)start using email again.