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Facebook May Dislike the Social Fixer Extension, but Many Users Love It (Video)
If you have the Social Fixer extension installed on your Web browser, you can post Facebook comments with line breaks you control with your "Enter" key, and insert your comments with "Tab + Enter." If you want to, that is. If you want to change the color of the blue "Facebook bar" at the top of your screen to puce, go right ahead. Want to have your newsfeed show the most recent stories at the top, rather than "Trending Articles" and "Trending Videos," or hide the "ticker feed" of friends' activities? Go right ahead. Social Fixer gives you the power to do all this, and more. Best of all, everything happens in your own browser. Social Fixer makes no changes to Facebook's servers and is not dependent on Facebook's APIs. Still, Facebook doesn't like some Social Fixer features, and says creator Matt Kruze must remove them if he doesn't want to be banned from Facebook. They've already removed his Social Fixer page from Facebook, so they apparently mean business. The Social Fixer website says it's "a free browser extension that improves the Facebook site by eliminating annoyances and adding lots of great enhancements and functionality." We don't know why Facebook would be against a browser extension (available for most popular browsers other than Explorer) that improves their users' site experience. Maybe someone from Facebook will contact us and let us know. Meanwhile, enjoy our video interview with Matt Kruze (or the transcript if you would rather read than watch and listen). One last note in the interest of full disclosure: Both Timothy Lord (timothy) and Robin Miller (Roblimo) use and like Social Fixer and believe that If you try it, chances are that you'll like it, too.
without browser extension or anything: just don't use the blasted thing...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I always just use shift+enter.
The threat appears to have been carried out. Kruze's Facebook page is made 'unavailable'.
--- Andy West http://andywest.org
What's wrong with shift+enter for line breaks like most other websites with Press-Enter-to-Submit?
In fact, Facebook's advertisers are their customers, and Facebook users are the product.
Yep. One of the things my mom hates is that Facebook keeps on resetting her news feed to "top stories" or whatever Facebook calls it instead of "most recent." Why does Facebook do that, she asks?
Well, simple: because "most recent" shows her what her friends have been doing most recently, and "top stories" shows her ads for random pages she's liked, along with a couple of posts from actual humans scattered amongst the ads. Not that hard to understand, really: Facebook's customers pay them to show ads to their users, so Facebook constantly forces users back to the ad-based view.
(And to be clear, what I'm calling "ads" are in fact regular posts, they're just posts from pages like "American Idol" and "Top Chef" or whatever else my mom has "liked" on Facebook. In some cases she does actually want to see those updates, just not at the expense of not showing updates from actual people. So the obvious answer of "install AdBlock Plus" won't help in this case. It's already installed anyway.)
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
While I agree with your premise your metaphor is actually incorrect. This is likely due to the age of the expression but robotics now allows cows to choose when and how they are milked. Cows also give the most milk and are far less stressed with the "elective milking" system.
Automatic Milking
I don't know how many years on this Earth I got left. I'm going to get real weird with it. - Frank Reynolds
Uh, no.
The primary purpose of the browser extension is to hide crap that you (the product) don't want to see, but advertisers (the customer) want you to see. Advertisers want to know who's clicking on trending crap - hiding it with a browser extension hurts Facebook's customers.
It also happens to have a few IU tweaks, like ENTER to carriage return.
Facebook has simply said that they're not going to keep providing a free platform for the distributor on it's own network.
[n.b. I use a similar extension, FB Purity.]
they don't like it because it makes their designers look stupid
Yes and no.
The answer to the article is "Go read the articles which Arstechnica already ran regarding Social Fixer".
But if you absolutely cannot be bothered, here's a brief rundown:
Facebook's TOS and developer EULA states (in layman's terms) that you can't make any changes to how the site is presented to the user.
This is exactly what Social Fixer does- it changes what and how the page renders. Now, we can get into an argument about whether or not they should have such an agreement, and argue about whether or not it affects Facebook's servers (since such plugins DO change how your browser will interact with the server), but that's all missing the point.
The point is that some time back FB shut down a bunch of different pages by other authors of other extensions which modified how the page was presented to the user. But Social Fixer got a free pass, probably because a) it was useful and well-written and b) the guy had been courting employment with FB and had inside connections.
When Ars ran the story about the other sites getting whacked but not Social Fixer, a bunch of people started bitching at Facebook about playing favorites.
So Facebook decided to apply the rules equally to everybody, and shut down the Social Fixer page.
At this point the author of Fixer started running around the internet pissing and crying about how he had no idea why he was shut down, even though his OWN BLOG flat out stated the reasons, and basically bitching that he was no longer getting a special exemption.
So, there you have it.
No, it isn't standard when the text the user is entering is frequently multi-line....like, say, for comments.
Just checked:
Slashdot -> enter works
Youtube -> enter works
Engadget -> enter works
Ars -> enter works
Gizmodo -> enter works
Any forum I can think of -> enter works
There is no reason for Facebook to be different.
Because "Enter" is used everywhere else to create a line break in a text box.