Facebook punks journalist
By Bala Shah

American blog TechCrunch is one of the most powerful tech media organizations in the world.  TechCrunch founder and CEO Michael Arrington is on first name basis with most senior managers of the top tech companies.  In a record of sorts, in a peak month of 2008 TechCrunch had a million readers to its RSS feed which is more than the figures of the top 10 tech blogs in India combined together.

One positive paragraph in this American blog TechCrunch could mean investment worth tens of thousands of dollars. Michael is one of the most powerful men in tech America.

Facebook is the hottest social networking website in the world with more than 250 million members.

Techcrunch,  like most media,  have written about the good and bad things of most social media including Facebook. Not unlike Indian media,  many of the articles are a critique of tech products and services. 

Facebook, like most tech companies,  has complaints about how traditional and new media operates in USA, India and other countries.  Tech companies around the world often speak of local journalists being critics rather than creators, biases, personal equations and bloody mindedness in their reporting. This is a complaint against journalists in India as well.

Techcrunch has done a number of hard hitting articles on Facebook. Yesterday, Facebook punked Techcrunch.

Facebook developers tweaked the Techcrunch page on Facebook so that it showed a ‘new’ feature ‘Fax this photo’.  The Facebook techies ensured that only the Techcrunch journalists could see it on Facebook.

Before you could say ‘Who is using fax these days?’,  Techcrunch published a story about this new Facebook feature.  Soon,  the giggling Facebook PR team confirmed that they were punking Techcrunch.

Techcrunch has taken it in good humour and blogged about it.