UPDATE (12:15 PM): Facebook's PR firm (Burson-Marsteller) is now publicly blaming Facebook for this entire fiasco, saying that the assignment was against Burson's policies and should never have been accepted.

While the list of potential suspects seemed quite short, public speculation in the absence of specific facts in this regard was inappropriate, so I made no accusations in this regard in that posting.

Today The Daily Beast has revealed that Facebook instigated the campaign, a fact that Facebook (and their PR firm that deployed the plan) have now both admitted.

Needless to say, Facebook was most certainly a featured entry on my suspect list. But the incredibly clumsy manner of their anti-Google mudslinging project would have put the incompetent Richard Nixon/Watergate "White House Plumbers" break-in team to shame.

C'mon guys, if you're gonna play the dirty tricks game, at least bring your antics up to Three Stooges competency levels -- no offense meant to the Stooges!

Facebook of course is attempting to spin this event not as an anti-Google campaign of lies, but rather as something of an "information gathering" effort. Yeah ... right ... information gathering -- sort of like the way J. Edgar Hoover used his FBI COINTELPRO "information gathering" program to try smear Martin Luther King, Jr. and many others. No, not the same scope, but seemingly a similar sort of intrinsically evil mind-set.

My overall level of respect for Facebook has long been at bargain basement levels. After these new shenanigans, it's going to take an oil rig to drill a hole deep enough for their new ranking.

A journey to the center of the Earth? In the end it will be Facebook's users who ultimately -- get the shaft.

--Lauren--

UPDATE (12:15 PM): Facebook's PR firm (Burson-Marsteller) is now publicly blaming Facebook for this entire fiasco, saying that the assignment was against Burson's policies and should never have been accepted.