There are lots of things you can do to get publicity that ultimately hurt your company. Maxim's like this have parts of truth but you can't throw all logic aside and just do things to generate publicity.

Facebook could delete everyone's profile and generate tons of publicity. They'd probably also go out of business.

I think it was a bad thing to do to their users.. but I would guess that the publicity it generated was well worth it. Heck it got me interested!