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The advice is to log out of Facebook. But logging out of Facebook only de-authorizes your browser from the web application, a number of cookies (including your account number) are still sent along to all requests to facebook.com. Even if you are logged out, Facebook still knows and can track every page you visit. The only solution is to delete every Facebook cookie in your browser, or to use a separate browser for Facebook interactions.
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➶ Facebook's Developer Forums Now Powered by Stack Overflow
Absolutely brilliant idea.
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➶ "Literally Unbelievable"
Single-purpose Tumblr Of The Week, it’s a blog dedicated to “Stories from The Onion as interpreted by Facebook”.
Scary, scary reading.
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➶ BlackBerry PlayBook Gets Facebook App Before iPad
Logic dictates that the PlayBook, the one that CIOs are supposed to love, gets a Facebook app before the iPad - though ZDNet’s Jason Perlow is unimpressed:
Not really impressed with FaceBook for PlayBook. The worst 3rd-party apps for iPad are better than this thing.
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➶ Facebook is a Ponzi Scheme
Interesting look at the woeful Facebook ad impressions I’ve seen people comment on.
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The Problem With Ping
It’s the end of the year, and every blog out there has its own 10 Top Failures to write about. Making almost every list out there is iTunes Ping - Apple’s widely-slated Music Social network. It’s easy to knock Ping (I’ll admit I’ve made a few in-person potshots about ‘the irony of the world’s most anti-social company wanting to build a social network’) and no-doubt publications are revelling in the page-view linkbait associated with placing an Apple product or two in a Top 10 Failures List. Linkbait aside, Ping certainly has its issues - and in the scheme of recent Apple product launches it’s certainly not changed the earth. So why do so many people have a problem with Ping?
It’s Overtly About Selling Music
Every social network that’s launched has always first focused on the ability to build a social graph, and then over time rolled out how to make money off the venture (using social graph and personal information to target ads, for instance).
Ping has no qualms in having a single (brutally apparent) goal: to sell more music via iTunes. It’s not hidden behind a service that scrobbles whatever your friends are currently listening, offering the convenient choice to buy any recently played song via the (startup-funding) iTunes affiliate link. Ping is built upon broadcasting what you purchase, to sell more music to your friends.
If anything, people’s loathing of Ping stems as much from the overt commercialism (hey, who knew Apple would be wanting to turn a profit on this thing?!) as it does from some of the functional break-down in the service.
It’s Awkward to Use
For an Apple product, Ping lacks any of the nice touches the company is renowned for. Look through your timeline (ignoring the fact that you can scroll through an entire fortnight’s activity on the homepage): it’s full of almost-broken English.
Before showing you how Ping handles things such as Likes and Comments - let’s look at Flickr, who not only add a possessive but use just an apostrophe when the username ends with an ‘s’ (very well played, Flickr):
steve commented on nikf’s photo
steve commented on stepahlicious’ photo
And Facebook (which uses full names):
Nik Fletcher commented on his album “Christmas 2010”
Nik Fletcher is now friends with Stephanie King
Now take a look at how Ping handles these notifications:
Nik liked Steve like of “We Belong Together” by Randy Newman
Nik commented on Nik purchase of “The Beatles”
Steve started following Xavier
It’s painfully stilted, and entirely devoid of personality. If a user comments on their own purchase, it should be “Nik commented on his purchase of The Beatles”, and when interacting with another person’s activity there’s a couple of things missing. First up, the possessive. Secondly it needs to answer “who is Steve”. Sure, there’s a tooltip that shows “Go to the Profile page for Steve Jobs” but compared to other social networks that make it super-easy to see whose activity is being Liked or Commented on, Ping makes it incredibly painful. The last of those three may seem perfectly fine - however this notification is for when someone you follow starts following someone else who you don’t. I have no clue who Xavier is - a surname and profile would help clear things up no-end.
It’s Only in iTunes
This is an easy one: it’s stilted by the slow loading of the iTunes Store, without any way to easily browse activity. It’s not a new browser tab to check what your friends are buying: it’s opening the iTunes window (or expanding it from the mini-player), choosing Ping and waiting. There’s no easy URLs for user profiles - e.g. ping.apple.com/nikf - it’s just an iTunes link with a user-ID (here’s my profile URL, for example). There’s no Ping equivalent to “I’m @nikf on Twitter”.
Are Purchases the Best Sign of A Recommendation?
Sure, iTunes now lets users share songs to Ping with Likes and Posts, but there’s no scrobbling. A purchase of a song isn’t the strongest indicator of a user’s liking of a song: the playing of a song is. Ping with Scrobbling would offer me far more of an incentive to visit - I care much more about what my friends are listening to as opposed to what they’re buying (and even when buying, there’s no guarantee the purchase will be via iTunes and thus tracked).
It’s Not Doomed
Before we entirely write off Ping, remember Apple iterates - famously - and for all the criticism, I’m fairly certain that Ping has achieved its goal: sell more music. With Ping receiving a tonne of negative press, I can’t imagine Apple ignoring the feedback. A quick review of the terse language, scrobbling support perhaps, and the breakout from iTunes would all offer Ping some redemption in 2011. And that’s before you even consider the possibility of the much-requested Ping for Apps.
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Facebook has become to the social web what Microsoft is to the desktop: mindbogglingly gargantuan, relentlessly mediocre, and almost inescapable. Like Microsoft twenty years ago, they will succeed because a bad standard is better than none: and like Microsoft ten years ago, they “innovate” by clumsily copying—and then trying to squash—the real innovators.
Techcrunch asks Can Anything Stop The Facebook Juggernaut -
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My decision to stop iPhone development has had everything to do with Apple’s policies.
Joe Hewitt, developer of the Facebook iPhone app. (via David Kaneda) -
➶ Needle in a haystack: efficient storage of billions of photos
Up to date, users have uploaded over 15 billion photos which makes Facebook the biggest photo sharing website. For each uploaded photo, Facebook generates and stores four images of different sizes, which translates to a total of 60 billion images and 1.5PB of storage. The current growth rate is 220 million new photos per week, which translates to 25TB of additional storage consumed weekly. At the peak there are 550,000 images served per second. These numbers pose a significant challenge for the Facebook photo storage infrastructure.
© Nik Fletcher 2007-2011 ~ Contact
