[Note: I work at Facebook, and have worked on some of the friend suggestion tools.]
There seems to be some confusion about how friend suggestions work, and we definitely want to people to understand how their information is used and their options to control it.
Generally, the contact importing tools and resulting friend suggestions have been used by millions of people to make hundreds of millions of friend connections. We're proud of this (since it is clear that real connections are made) but also understand that people should have control. That's why we include a notice in the contact sync (on phones) and upload (on the web) flows that makes it clear that contacts you import may be used generate friend suggestions for you and others. If you're concerned about being suggested as a friend to others based on the contacts in your address book, you can either not upload it, or if you have already uploaded it, you can remove your uploaded contacts (http://www.facebook.com/contact_importer/remove_uploads.php). You can also block any individual people. These steps prevent what the Alex (or rather, his friends) experienced — people being suggested as friends based on having a phone number in their address book.
Also, some of you have noticed that we don't always require a phone verification for an account. This is a security feature designed to prevent spam and fake accounts that is only triggered when certain conditions aren't met.
As a completely independent observer having no stakes in this game, I think that the facts absolutely don't point this way. None of your "arguments" has explicitly refuted the attacks. All refutations have been shown (with proof) to be invalid.
Finally, it just does not seem like all that plastered excessive AdSense is doing the Internet any good at all. What value are you providing there, exactly? If those are just pages which don't get much traffic, you could just remove the AdSense from there and the world will thank you for it.
There is absolutely nothing in there which isn't matter-of-fact. Again, I work for FB (and I joined less < 2 yrs ago) so you will generally diss this as well, but w/e...
How can Google NOT look at that sample page Aaron has displayed? That is truly terrible :( Also, Matt Cutts is generally very honest and public, but in this case, uncharacteristically quiet.
This doesn't say that at all. The rendering code you write needs to be modular as well, and has quite a bunch of logic built into it (even when all the model and controller logic is separate.) So when you write your renderers as classes or functions, that is when you realize the benefit of XHP.
it is indeed one of the coolest things i have used. the fact that you have all the HTML stored as objects and available for manipulation makes all kinds of crazy post-processing (just before rendering) possible.
That last sentence is the right question. If you think about _that_ for a few minutes instead, you will certainly come up with some arguments (positive or negative); but just saying "is G the next M?" is negative-content, really.
Argh what is the point of comments like these? It is totally drowning out any useful discussion about the actual merits or demerits of the product. The iPod was a lame "me-too" product, eh?