Nick O’Neill at AllFacebook digs for, and finds, the status of status.

Is there a bigger meaning behind this?

If anything, debates like these illustrate the perils of being the most buzzed about social site. Community users have always been able to rise up against a site (remember the Digg ‘number’ scandal?). But media and special interest groups  exert a type of pressure that users can’t and won’t.

Why? Because their success, unlike users’ success, is driven by controversy, not ease of use (I’m singling out TechCrunch more than any other site here). Weren’t all the blogs heralding Friendfeed and Plaxo a few weeks ago? Didn’t they praise the aggregation of social feeds? Now that Facebook Beacon is actually doing it, all we hear are complaints.

Right now, the status of “is” is up for grabs. But you can bet that when “is” finally does get dropped, someone like Duncan Riley will be begging for Facebook to return to the way it “was” before.