Getting the Last Laugh
Facebook has a quirky sense of humor. After the technology website TechCrunch poked fun at the social-networking giant once too often, it responded by changing the responsible reporters' personal Facebook pages to include a "Fax this Photo" option. When befuddled scribe Jason Kincaid e-mailed the company to inquire about the ridiculous new feature, a member of Facebook's p.r. team responded, "We already faxed you a statement on this. Didn't you get it?" Facebook claimed they'd been working on the feature since 1992.
Kincaid immediately wrote about the photo-faxing feature. "Maybe I'm missing something here," he wrote on TechCrunch, "but I'm not sure why Facebook would do this." He pointed out that faxed photos are of notoriously bad quality and that e-mail works much better, concluding that the new feature was "a stupid idea." Facebook finally admitted that it was having a laugh at Kincaid's expense, and TechCrunch issued a correction. It seems there was even an office bet going to see how long it would take someone to write about it.