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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.
I'm a user of the extension myself, and it really seems like Facebook is going out of their way to attack the developer. The extension doesn't put any additional strain on their servers, doesn't utilize any API calls, and isn't destructive. What's next, going after users who have AdBlock installed? Or perhaps ones who aren't using a specific browser? Are they going to demand changes of Trillian or GNOME's social media integration? It should be up to the users to utilize the site in the way they prefer.
No, their designers make their designers look stupid.
"We don't know why Facebook would be against a browser extension that improves their users' site experience."
Easy. You seem to be operating under the very common -- but clearly mistaken -- belief that Facebook users are Facebook's customers. In fact, Facebook's advertisers are their customers, and Facebook users are the product. Once you look at it from this perspective, everything Facebook does makes sense.
I always just use shift+enter.
so Facebook will ban me too?
The threat appears to have been carried out. Kruze's Facebook page is made 'unavailable'.
--- Andy West http://andywest.org
Hey Facebook, Google "Streisand Effect". Especially useful when you're attacking that which you have no control over.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Genius! I don't know how you come up with these ideas. Did you know we can eliminate the risk of being in an automobile crash by never leaving home? And we will never suffer from food poisoning if we just don't eat.
We get it. You don't use Facebook. You think that makes you special. I bet you don't have a TV either. Hell, you probably don't even remember what a TV looks like. We understand you here.
The fundamental bad assumption here is that FaceBook would be happy about the user experience being streamlined and more efficient. If they're showing something to you it's *because they want you to see it*, even if (or especially if) it slows you down and means you have to click more and see things you didn't want to see. You didn't want to see it, but *they* want you to see it. This extension takes away their total control.
You aren't the customer, you are the product. The cow doesn't get to choose how it gets milked.
because the enter key is the thing designed to enter linebreaks in editors. That it was hijacked by websites to do something different is not the enter key's fault. Most users, and remember what kind of user uses facebook, expect enter to add a linebreak like ti does everywhere else.
Maybe ten or fifteen years ago. On the modern Web, users expect Enter to equal Submit... especially for a single textbox entry form that, the vast majority of the time, is only used for a single sentence or less. It's fairly standard across the Web and has been for quite some time.
Not every discussion about an app is an advertisement. This is a legitimate issue. I use it, and like it. And if FB is trying to screw me over, because of a browser extension, we have an issue.
What next, only approved browsers can be used?
And do we need to make sure only Operating Systems that are blessed can be used?
One of its features is blocking ads (and paid placements, i.e. ads.) That's what Facebook is upset about. It's that simple.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Once again, I learned about and downloaded a great utility thanks to the Streisand Effect. Thanks, Facebook!
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
Some of my friends don't check their e-mail more than once every few weeks and don't sign in to any instant messenger often, but most of them are on Facebook at least once per day. If something else had quite the communications potential for reaching a long list of friends quickly, I'd be more than interested. As it is, Facebook serves a purpose as a semi-public message board, announcement center, etc. Its usefulness depends on your own circle of friends.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Checkmate, creationists.
So I should be expecting 'Enter' here to press the Preview button?
I'd love to see something like this. Clearly it wouldn't work for everyone, but it would be fun to have the ability to encrypt -- even if it was a basic substitution cipher -- postings and messages that would automagically be decrypted by anyone using the add-on (and having whatever the key was).
I'm not thinking of "hard" encryption, but scrambling that would totally defeat Facebook's analytics and the desire by Facebook to turn off privacy settings to enhance their search, etc.
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.
It would at least make sense if that were the case. But, it isn't. They have demanded he remove portions of social fixer that have nothing to do with ads or the blocking of them. In my opinion, when your site serves up HTML, as long as my browser does not subvert your webserver to gain unauthorized access, or use your APIs in a way that you did not intend it to, then what I do with that HTML you have served up is entirely my business.
Users expect enter to mean submit when they're typing into a single-line text input field. If you're in a textarea, it should give you a line break. Facebook at least makes their textarea look like a plain text input, so I suppose I can't hate on them too much.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
This is just a browser extension that isn't using any Facebook APIs though, so it is not bound by the Facebook TOS and dev EULA.
Because "Enter" is used everywhere else to create a line break in a text box.