I got back home last night to a power outage. The whole building is out. Apparently some circuit on the main cross street nearby blew and LA DPW is working on it now. They said they would be done by 10am but it’s after 1pm and still no power. There’s only enough juice to charge my cell so i’m using that for Internet access for now.

Not sure how long I can stand this. I need to get work done.

I tried buying some ad placements on Facebook, but it keeps rejecting my attempt to make a purchase, claiming that the address I’m entering is wrong.  I called my bank and they verified that they do see multiple authorization attempts for $1.01, all of which were approved by the bank but not cleared by Facebook.  So clearly my CC bank is approving the authorizations, but Facebook’s system is too stupid to handle it.

I tried to find a phone number to contact Facebook, there is none to be found on their site, so I used their customer support form page, which of course will likely never get responded to.  I looked up their domain records and found a number there, but when I called it was an automated voicemail “we’ll get back to you” system, so they’re highly unlikely to get back to me on that, although I did leave my contact info.  My bank said they can’t find a phone number associated with the authorization attempts until (unless) the transactions go through.

I could try using my personal credit card instead of my business credit card, but I hate filling out expense reports.  Yes, even when you run your own company you’ve got to generate expense reports for yourself to keep the books straight.

Apparently, I’m not alone in this experience.  I found some other related write-ups:

• http://www.urbanpit.com/2008/07/faceless-at-facebook.html
• http://fvrit.com/archive/2008/05/08/facebook-advertising-sucks.aspx

UPDATE: After reading some stories about people having their ads and credit cards banned, and even their accounts cancelled based on ad purchases, I figued it would be best if I created a second Facebook profile solely for ad placements.  Well, guess what?  Facebook won’t even let me create such an account because I keep getting the error “Please enter a valid email address.” even though I am entering a valid email address.

I’m starting to think that Facebook is all smoke & mirrors.  “100 million members” my ass - I would be willing to bet that 80 million are automated accounts and, of the remaining 20 million, less than 25% are actually active enough to count as members.  Don’t get me wrong, Myspace isn’t any better, but is it too much to expect that a company with a claim of such a huge membership level actually be capable enough to ensure the most simplistic features of its service actually work?