Panic is not the kind of reaction you expect to last for long however. For social media to benefit the end-user you expect a robust response from Facebook and some healthy competition. There is no getting away from the fact that Facebook has 10% of the world’s population in its user base. Were it to move fast, shed its university campus autocratic ways and become membership-centric it would be more than enough to stop it haemorrhaging members to Google and it would up the ante in the social network game.

Sadly there is no evidence of this happening just yet. Facebook, which in 2011 set out to woo journalists, has been consistently taking aim at its own foot with the biggest guns it can find. This month it banned a user’s account for placing a Facebook ad asking people to add him to their circles in Google . While banning the ad itself could conceivably be justified based on some of Facebook’s guidelines regarding ads, banning the user’s all other ad campaigns which were not breaking the rules smacks of petty reprisal and just the kind of autocratic behaviour Facebook has been trying to convince us it has shed.