If that's not enough, a company named Friendthem reportedly threatened a lawsuit, saying Facebook stole its idea for the location-aware feature. Apparently, Friendthem would like to share the heat.
Item two: A blogger noticed over the weekend that Facebook, without asking permission, had changed the default e-mail addresses of all of its digital residents to @facebook.com accounts. It's easy enough to change back, as the site Lifehacker and others have detailed, but that little invasion of the hub of digital identity -- the Facebook Timeline -- was enough to make quite a few Facebookers fire back at their digital overlords. Security researchers called the move dangerous. Normal people felt violated.
"Up next: Facebook inside your underwear drawer!" a commenter wrote on our site.
So that was this week. But it seems like every week has been feeling a little like that.
The fact that an anti-Facebook sentiment bubbles beneath the currents of modern life is, of course, nothing new. When the company introduced the now-popular News Feed in September 2006, users threw a fit -- and many abandoned the young network, at least for a moment.
Let's put the brakes on for just a second and ask a few questions:
Are people mad about Facebook's individual decisions -- the e-mail, the tracking, the News Feed -- or do the roots of this discontent reach into deeper, darker places? If it's the latter, why are people so continually frustrated? Do we hold Facebook to too high of a standard? Is the social network turning its back on users? Or is it just that our digital lives are now so invested in Facebook that it would be nearly impossible to pull out at this point -- and, because of that, we feel helpless?
