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FTFA: Facebook would be better if you could link to friends' pages on MySpace and Bebo. The Facebook Platform lets you do just that. I recently made a flickr account and wanted to share those photos with my Facebook friends, so I used the "My Flickr" app to add a section in my Facebook profile that showed thumbnails from my flickr stream and provided a link to my flickr URL. I was also able to view which of my friends had added the app and added them as contacts on flickr. This was all made possible because flickr and Facebook both have APIs for developers.

So apparently 6Billion out of the 6.6Billion (Ref) people on earth have interweb access! Some how overnight the Internet usage went from 1.1Billion (Ref) to 6Billion overnight!

To debunk this author just a little more, Facebook has a comprehensive developer system which allows anyone to program features in to facebook. And the beauty is, facebook controls the style of the interface so it doesn't look like myspace does

Without even reading TFA, it's obvious that the author doesn't have clue.

The point of Facebook and similar networks is that access is controlled. The concept of a Friends list is what makes it work.

A lot of people want a place that will allow people to find them, to even follow what they're doing in their lives, but where they can also restrict who sees how much data. Facebook provides that.

Critical to understanding this is to realize that our ideas about privacy are changing rapidly, and different people have different expectations and comfort levels with respect to what they want to share, and who they want to share it.

What I place on my web site is different from what I blog, and is different from my Facebook profile and a Facebook group about a current romance. And each of those reaches a different population, some by chance, some by design and control.

No, the author lacks an understanding about all of this.

Without even reading TFA, it's obvious that the author doesn't have clue.

The point of Facebook and similar networks is that access is controlled. The concept of a Friends list is what makes it work.

A lot of people want a place that will allow people to find them, to even follow what they're doing in their lives, but where they can also restrict who sees how much data. Facebook provides that.

Critical to understanding this is to realize that our ideas about privacy are changing rapidly, and different people have different expectations and comfort levels with respect to what they want to share, and who they want to share it.

What I place on my web site is different from what I blog, and is different from my Facebook profile and a Facebook group about a current romance. And each of those reaches a different population, some by chance, some by design and control.

No, the author lacks an understanding about all of this.

> Want to show somebody a video or a picture you
> posted to your profile? They have to have an account.

Yup, but that's an enabler, too. For example, you can have an app that allows for conversations to develop around a video. Rather nice.

Disclaimer: I helped work on that one, tech details here.

The reporter's profile

and facebook profile

and linkedin profile

And this was from the DIGG community. Wow, do reporters even try anymore?

Posting anonymous because I don't want to look like a total creep. Or an Internet Hate Machine (TM). Hrm, will this give me Hackers on Steroids cred? (actaully I just want to save karma, because I don't normally do this)

Oh sure, it sounds like a good idea... but I bet you'd get tired of people from group #2 asking you print out copies of facebook for them.

Throw in a bunch of typical private investor types and a megalomaniac boy-wonder CEO and they've got all the "right" boxes checked.

Throw in a bunch of typical private investor types and a megalomaniac boy-wonder CEO and they've got all the "right" boxes checked.

And that's exactly how an Internet company should be run.

I remember reading an article a few months back about how Craigslist runs its offices out of an old Victorian-style mansion in CA that actually costs somewhat less than traditional "office space". They only keep a small staff on hand, pay them well (proportional to the success of the company), and accordingly, have never lost an employee.

Sure, this strategy won't make the owners/founders of the company uber-rich, but it does quite a bit to ensure the success of the company and ALL of its employees.

Facebook appears to have adopted the same strategy. What's more is that they don't seem to have experienced any noticeable growing pains. I've been using the site for quite a while (since the beginning), and it's always been decently fast and responsive. They had a few issues with their modifications to Squid in the *very* early days, but apart from that, I don't think I've ever been thrown to an error page (which Myspace does regularly, usually barfing up bits of their embarrassingly bad code with it because some sort of debugging switch was left on). Facebook even contributes to and maintains a few open-source projects, and are avid users of MemCached.

The UW needs to stop aiding the RIAA for this specific reason: The RIAA requires no legal proof whatsoever to send one of their letters of extortion demanding money. However, if the UW refused to send letters, the RIAA would have to subpoena the information under an actual court of law. This is how our country is supposed to run.

I've seen what these applications have been doing. They add a little more joy to the users that use them. That's not a bad thing.

Also, if you want static facebook pages, you are welcome to create those pages using their API: http://developers.facebook.com/documentation.php

Their API allows you to re-create in total the facebook of 3 months ago. :-D

Now, what these applications have been doing, the sheer number of them, is degrading facebook's performance. But that's true of a lot of sites that growing exponentially like facebook is.

Also, I've been pretty frustrated with bug fixes. They've been pretty slow and coming but that's part of the aggressive schedule they set for themselves. A developer in Facebook, Ari Steinberg, wished he had another month at launch.

Disclaimer: I've been making facebook applications on their platform since May.

Not sure if it had anything to do with the Slashdot post - but the NewsCloud application is now approved and listed in the Facebook Directory.

We really haven't had much trouble with our app either. We anticipated Facebook making lots of changes and built our app to respond accordingly. If something breaks, our app saves as much information about the event as possible so that we can fix it ASAP. Isn't that a pretty standard way of doing things? We keep a close eye on what happens and are able to make minor tweaks to keep the app running smoothly. We haven't seen major breakage; everything has been fixable in 20 minutes max. Our app ( http://apps.facebook.com/graffiti/ for the curious) was recently approved into the directory. We had a significant number of users already through the viral aspect of it all, but we're seeing a rather significant spike now that we're reaching out to even more networks through the directory. We had some hiccups getting in (partly our fault, partly Facebook), but now all it takes it to make sure everything is filled out completely. In my experience, they're really trying to seek out the trouble spots. Do we need the directory? No, but we're grateful for it! I agree that the documentation is lacking, but there's an IRC channel, discussion board, mailing list, and developer email support that make up for it. And yes, the Facebook guys do respond through all those channels!

II. Consent Regarding Use of Facebook Site Information

(a) Information That May Be Provided to Developers. In order to allow you to use and participate in Platform Applications created by Developers ("Developer Applications"), Facebook may from time to time provide Developers access to the following information (collectively, the "Facebook Site Information"):

(i) any information provided by you and visible to you on the Facebook Site, excluding any of your Contact Information, and

(ii) the user ID associated with your Facebook Site profile.

(b) Examples of Facebook Site Information. The Facebook Site Information may include, without limitation, the following information, to the extent visible on the Facebook Site: your name, your profile picture, your gender, your birthday, your hometown location (city/state/country), your current location (city/state/country), your political view, your activities, your interests, your musical preferences, television shows in which you are interested, movies in which you are interested, books in which you are interested, your favorite quotes, the text of your "About Me" section, your relationship status, your dating interests, your relationship interests, your summer plans, your Facebook user network affiliations, your education history, your work history, your course information, copies of photos in your Facebook Site photo albums, metadata associated with your Facebook Site photo albums (e.g., time of upload, album name, comments on your photos, etc.), the total number of messages sent and/or received by you, the total number of unread messages in your Facebook in-box, the total number of "pokes" you have sent and/or received, the total number of wall posts on your Wall, a list of user IDs mapped to your Facebook friends, your social timeline, and events associated with your Facebook profile.

When one tries to add any application to their profile, it says, from which the above was quoted (emphasis mine):

The author of the "article" doesn't seem to get "it" with regards to the platform.

Firstly, the documentation isn't fantastic, I agree, it's a relatively straight-forward REST api, and wouldn't you know it, the community of developers has been filling in the documentation gaps

As for instability, it's been there for the most part, you have to understand that Facebook might lack of the 100% reliability you may think your own code has. Facebook developers aren't perfect, nor is it unusual for things to break when near 25 million active users a day pound on it (at the very least, tiny bugs, image caching collisions i'm looking at you, become big bugs. As a side note, that has to have been the most famous end-table on the planet before they fixed that bug).

Finally, I've seen the "outcries over its application approval process" and those are silly as well. A very tiny percent of users actually install the application from the directory. My applications have blown up because of making use of the viral tools provided by the platform, invites, news feed postings, etc. Applications like X-Me exploded to well over 100k users before it was even listed (congrats chips), the same went for Graffiti

No system, especially a third-party system you rely on as a developer is ever perfect, but it's barely been a month since the Facebook Platform, so crying foul is extremely premature. If your only concern is that there's no one regulating the utility, then you should go ask some of those Windows developers how much fun the Longhorn-Vista moving target of a platform has been. It's their API, their platform, their social network, they get to choose what goes on with their "utility."

I'm sure i'll be marked as a troll, but this just reads like the same gripes at the bottom of the barrel in the FB Developers discussion board for some time now.
Disclaimer: I was one of the F8 attendees, and have been developing for the platform for almost 2 months now

Are you sure about that?

I don't use MySpace, but I do use Facebook and noted that their login page was http. After reading their privacy blurb which said all sensitive info was encrypted, I sent an email to them and inquired about it.

I got a very friendly and quick response back saying that login is encrypted, it's just that it happens very quickly. Of course I didn't believe them, so I fired up Wireshark, and sure enough, login was via https://login.facebook.com./

I searched through the normal http conversation from the packet dump and found no reference to my password or username.

Personally I'd prefer that they don't hide their use of SSL, but i'm sure they have their reasons, beuller?

"For every 100 who join by yesterday, I'll donate $1 to time travel research"
http://osu.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2229376042

These face recognition programs are fantastic!

http://photos-489.ak.facebook.com/photos-ak-sf2p/v 74/6/57/529971421/n529971421_97489_2572.jpg/

This is new, and quite a bit different than the API that has been around for awhile.

Now, instead of just using the API to integrate Facebook with external apps, developers can use the platform to run their apps right inside of Facebook. For example, a Flickr app could be made that would replace the built-in photo tools.

There are already 30 or so apps available to add.

RTFM. This allows apps with custom HTML, etc., within Facebook pages. I'm not quite clear on who/what/when/how people can develop for this, though. E.g., will it just be a collection of approved and vetted third party components people can select from to put/use, in among other places, on their profile pages? Or will anyone effectively able to develop and deploy custom modules, but where/how they are deployed is a tightly controlled and distinctly separate environment?

See: http://developers.facebook.com/

Apps, including custom HTML, will be able to integrate into Profile pages. But you're right...it won't be the abomination that is MySpace.

http://www.facebook.com/mobile/?phonebook

http://nyu.facebook.com/s.php?q=Ashley+Heyer

As I said numerous times,

People don't seem to understand that this goes beyond a silly little hex key. The key has been out for months. A new one will come and it will also be broken. This is not about that. This is about consumers finally standing up against the bullshit being fed to them by media giants. They crossed the line today when they forced digg to censor user generated content, not only articles but also comments and somewhat related content.

As a consumer i am sick and tired of getting fabricated excuses as to why i can't play what I've bought wherever the hell i want. NO, i don't care if you keep making up the story that DRM is to protect yourself from piracy. I don't buy it. DRM will be broken no matter what. DRM is there to ensure your revenue stream by controlling where I can play the content. Now you go and censor my news source giving a bullshit excuse that a randomly generated hex number is some how your IP? You install rootkits in my computer, You stop me from using my content I bought the way I want? pretend to own _MY_ hardware? Enough of that bullshit.

This is a revolt against the greediness and blatant disrespect for the consumer that comes from the mpaa/riaa.

SAVE THE NUMBERS, SAVE THE WORLD. REMEMBER The 1st of MAY.

There's a facebook group too now. Wonder how long it'll last ;-)

OK, Alex, here we go:

"Okay, seriously. Let's drop the act. Okay? Yes? Let's quit pretending. I am quite male. I only said I was female to mess with your head." - by StarKruzr (74642) on Monday April 02, @08:18PM (#18581257)

We've been over this. Why does it matter again? Why do you keep coming back to this? Are you THAT freaked out by being unable to determine someone's gender online? Recall that YOU were the one who originally suggested I might be female, I just went along with it. You poor, poor insecure little boy stuck in a balding 47-year-old's body.

Are you proud of this, in your being caught as a liar with your own words and also turning up a TOTAL blowhard?

Yes. In fact, Mommy put this entire exchange on her refrigerator!

You also did this kind of critique with no merits and lies towards myspace.com as well, you outright disgusting liar. ... are you, like, a MySpace investor or something? They haven't changed one whit since 2002. The developers have been cruising on their existing codebase for 5 years. The social networking features don't work -- as anyone who looks at anyone else's profile and sees "so and so is in your 'Extended Network'" can attest to. The site is in desperate need of a redesign. For an example of social networking done CORRECTLY, see Facebook. Why do you care so much about one offhanded comment about MySpace?

Lol, you cry like a beyotch.

Lol, when did I lol cry like an lol beyotch lol?

you with no accomplishments in this field of good note or repute online period, lol

lol absence of evidence is not evidence of absence lol. Look up the definitions of "necessary condition" and "sufficient condition," then come back and try again.

You started this all up Yes? don't try to bullshit anyone reading here I'm not? The only people who have read any of this are you and me, APK, with the exception of whoever modded me down like... three weeks ago. You were also caught lying as well. About something that doesn't matter? Why do you care? How does me fucking around with you by saying I'm female have anything to do with... anything? Did you major in non sequiturs at LeMoyne or what?

Where apk was modded up +4, and you got a lol, -1 for trolling & flaming (which means nothing)

T,FTFY

Now. Let me educate you a little bit on why your "Registry Cleaning Engine" is what we in the computer science industry like to call "fucking worthless."

The Windows Registry, as I hope to God you know since you've written software that edits it, is organized in a tree data structure. Now, even assuming that Windows needed to search through the registry file every time it needed to look something up, the time complexity (i.e., the order of magnitude of how long it takes) of searching through a tree is approximately equal to log(n), where n is the number of entries in the tree. This is VERY, VERY FAST. Linear (n) scans of things are very fast already. log(n) is even faster. Your "Registry Cleaning Engine" removed 300-some-odd entries (on my test box, since I wouldn't put your software on a machine that mattered if my life depended on it) from a file that contains TENS OF THOUSANDS of items. This means that it reduced search time by log(300something). This is maybe a couple clock cycles. MAYBE.

Now, let's get out of the realm of the theoretical and get into real life. The Registry is NOT searched through every time Windows needs information from it. Instead, it is read from the file once, at boot, and loaded into memory into a static data structure which is a hybrid of a tree and an array. Windows keeps index pointers to important information and can do search through the tree for anything it doesn't have pointers to (naturally, the higher the branching factor at any level, the faster the search is). This means your "Engine" is even MORE worthless, because anything impor

First Surf of The Day

Slashdot The Milwaukee Journal Gnews Fark Digg Mac OS X Hints Google Calendar Upper Room Google Personalized Home Page My Stumbleupon Page BuzzFeed Brookfield Now Facebook Three Random Stumbles

After the first run it is /., jsonline, Gnews, Fark, and Digg.

First Surf of The Day

Slashdot The Milwaukee Journal Gnews Fark Digg Mac OS X Hints Google Calendar Upper Room Google Personalized Home Page My Stumbleupon Page BuzzFeed Brookfield Now Facebook Three Random Stumbles

After the first run it is /., jsonline, Gnews, Fark, and Digg.

First Surf of The Day

Slashdot The Milwaukee Journal Gnews Fark Digg Mac OS X Hints Google Calendar Upper Room Google Personalized Home Page My Stumbleupon Page BuzzFeed Brookfield Now Facebook Three Random Stumbles

After the first run it is /., jsonline, Gnews, Fark, and Digg.

I used to check out http://freshmeat.net/ almost daily, but that was when I was only a few years into Linux and still on an endless search for software that did different things, and at the time it seemed simpler to just wait and see what came up on fm every day (you could easily tell how active things were that way, too). Speaking of fm---does anyone have a copy of that old butchered-meat logo fm used to have, waaaay back, before the beginning of the fm II theme?

About weekly, I'll check out http://amasci.com/ (amateur science and electricity stuff), http://en.wikipedia.org/ (duh), http://www.cray-cyber.org/ (free supercomputer access), http://www.hpcalc.org/ (HP48/49/etc calculator stuff), etc., to check for new stuff. I'll check my http://facebook.com/ and http://myspace.com/orangesquid (shuddup) messages about weekly. From time to time I might browse http://www.amazing1.com/ (catalog which has Tesla coils and stuff, though they're not actually the best place for parts/kits/devices) or search for scientific equipment or old unix systems on http://www.ebay.com/ (see the Used SGI Buying Guide FAQ, etc).

I also check up on some of my friends via http://os.livejournal.com/friends every few days.

Lately I've been choosing a new section on http://scitoys.com/ to read every few days. Every few weeks, I'll usually find a different information-type site to read through gradually, or pick a topic to research on wikipedia.

Sorry, try again. They didn't release their internal API

I can't agree more! And the creator of Facebook has said multiple times that they are not going to allow custom CSS on profiles or crazy stuff like that. They have also gone a long way with privacy settings (after much outrage in the facebook community)

As a college student, I love Facebook. I use it to keep up with high school friends, keep in contact with people from the school I transfered from, know the people in my classes so I can throw questions at them if I have one, and since I am bad with names it is a great tool to remember people by!

The information I have on Facebook you could probably find elsewhere. But having such a clean interface is great. and their improvements are going to be great (membership required)

Right now, one major thing that keeps Myspace's user base so incredibly high is the lack of a widely adopted technology like OpenID.

How are Myspace and OpenID remotely related? A decentralized social network would be nifty, but OpenID definitely isn't one. In the mean time, better social networks offer open APIs that let you access their friend data.

that's what she said.
International That's What She Said Day. You need a facebook login probably to view the event.

-Ed

It's also worth noting that, in addition to things like 1 million strong for Barack, his team has set up it's own social networking site where Obama supporters can share photos, messages, groups, fundraising, and events.

Dean ushered in Internet fundraising in 2004. Could Obama harness social networking?

A few shops here and there, sure, but not much.

One of them had an idea about a world wide wiki.

Another started letting people put up faces and join groups of friends.

I'm not sure what this one does, but it serves billions of pages/day via hypertext preprocessor (and now with peanut butter:-)).

Or if not illegal, it should have serious repecussions for them as a registrar up to the point of dropping their registrar status.

And in the case there is content that shouldn't be public on the site, that is a _hosting_ issue not a domain issue.

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/26/154 2218&threshold=1

myspace has just flexed it's muscle to get a website with over 250,000 useful articles knocked off the internet because one article happened to contain user names and passwords. what did they do? rather than doing the right thing and asking Seclists.org to remove the ONE offending article, they went to godaddy and had the entire site pulled.

as a show of disgust over this and many other actions that myspace has displayed, i am going to delete my account on 1/29/2007, and configure my computer to never let me access myspace again. i suggest that you do the same. contact me (nate [at] gotnate.com) if you need help blocking your own access to myspace. :)

as an alternative, i recommend facebook.com. here's my profile: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=516019381

note: gotnate.com is currently hosted with godaddy. i will be taking similar actions with them as well.

MySpace shouldn't have allowed their users to modify the pages so heavily. They shouldn't have allowed people to have music that plays when you visit the page. They shouldn't have made a system that can't talk to other stuff (like del.icio.us tags or RSS readers). They shouldn't have made it so freaking hard to use. (It takes three times as many clicks to do on something on MySpace than what it should take.)

Try facebook? It is essentialy the same social aspect of myspace except all you can do on your page is post a list of things you like, some stuff about yourself and photo albums (they load separately from main page). Oh and people's names are their real life names not Xxxx**8XxxStarry PrIncessEsssSSsXXXxxxxXxx. Oh yeah if you want there is an option to create an RSS stream out of your profile.

I could write a better MySpace clone in the space of a weekend. However, nobody would use it. Why? Because it's not "MySpace."

Facebook HAS opened to the real world. http://www.facebook.com/

I can assure you, I'm female, for real. http://photos-254.ak.facebook.com/ip005/v27/192/38 /5319221/n5319221_30678254_7083.jpg See?

Fox is supposedly hiring 300 new software engineers to work on reengineering the site. As long as they can keep thier userbase and allow them thier geocities like pages, friendster-like friends lists, and allow indie bands to upload thier music for electrionic distribution then they probably won't be going anywhere.

However, since http://facebook.com/ is now open to everyone; everyone i know is now using that for thier social networking needs.

I just saw today that you can get a free Jimi from Facebook/Chase if you join their group on Facebook.
http://www.facebook.com/plus1/

Competitors to Microsoft exist: Apple, Linux

Competitors to Yahoo exist: Google, etc.

Competitors to MySpace exist: Facebook, etc.

Competitors to YouTube exist: Revver, Vobbo.

The network makes it difficult, but nobody's ever given up because something was difficult. There are always options, and yes - there can be significant barriers to entry, but it's never "impossible".

It's not just YouTube that is having issues with advertisers disguising as regular people. Facebook had a group a week or two ago along the lines of "if 100,000 people join my girlfriend will have a threesome with me." The group quickly had many hundreds of thousands of members, until it was realized that this was in fact a fraud and an advertisement for something. As soon as Facebook got wind that it was a fake they took down the group. I'm not sure about YouTube's Terms of Use Agreement, but I know that Facebook's specifically disallows using the site in any means for commercial reasons.

Darn, I really should stop e-banking and shopping online, then.

But, seriously, Facebook profiles are (by default) visible to a lot of people, but not everyone. That does not mean one can reasonably expect the information to be kept from a specific person: we are talking about how easy it is to simply ask someone on that person's school network to look at their profile. On the other hand, Facebook has a Privacy Policy, and it is reasonable to expect them to folow it.

FTFA: Zuckerberg runs a 150-person company that has raised $38 million in venture capital.

150 people, $38 million, and this is all they can come up with? Are you serious? The site is slllllooooowwww. The photo archive almost never works. I've received many errors while browsing the site. I think at this point, they're just trying to find new development initiatives to keep those 150 people busy and make the investors think that they are attempting to compete in the vertical.

It's bad enough that they didn't learn enough from their userbase when the implemented the "streams" or whatever they call them. Now they're going to continue pissing off the userbase by taking away the one thing that made facebook interesting in the first place, exclusivity. 22-year-old entrepreneur, prepare to be 22-year-old failure looking for your next venture. You're quickly becoming irrelevant.

...so if it turns out that they then retain the right to publish the information to all, then that is something to be worried about.

By posting Member Content to any part of the Web site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, perform, display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such information and content and to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such information and content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.