YCRFS 7: Applications of Facebook Instant Personalization | Hacker News Reader

YCRFS 7: Applications of Facebook Instant Personalization

ycombinator.com

45 pointspg30 comments

https://web.archive.org/web/20100830194600/http://ycombinato...

Okay, before we go anywhere I need a couple of answers.

A. Is Instant Personalization ("InP") built on an open protocol?

In other words, if I build foo.example.com and it uses InP to access Facebook's social graph, and later on I decide I also want to support Google's social graph, will Google be able to serve that graph using the same InP protocol? Or can I write a middleware service that grabs data with InP, massages the data (e.g. "filter out only the friends who live in a particular zip code") and reexports the data using the InP protocol?

Or will Facebook's lawyers be fighting such a move every step of the way?

B. Okay, we're playing in Facebook's world, the world where everyone has a public social graph and everything in their profile is public, public, public. Fine. But does this mean that, if I use Instant Personalization to grab a user's extremely-public social graph, I'm allowed to use it as I would any other public information that I stumbled across on the web? Can I, for example, index it and search it? Or can I write a tool that populates a second social network's database with a list of friends from Facebook?

Or will Facebook's InP terms of service require that I avoid doing that, because what "public" really means is "everyone can look at it, but only if they pay Facebook one cent every time they look and promise not to take any pictures or remember anything?"

Hey there. I'm Austin Haugen a product manager on the Facebook platform team.

A/ Instant Personalization uses the same set of APIs as the rest of platform. The only thing that changes with Instant Personalization, is that when you hit FB to see if the user is connected to your application, we will return 'connected' for all logged in Facebook users, who haven't opted out.

B/ Instant Personalization follows the same data policies as data you would get through a standard Facebook application. Details can be found here in section III: http://developers.facebook.com/policy/

This is very frightening news. Even if I did want this feature at all (I don't), I would still be extremely concerned that some site that I might wind up on will capture any personally identifiable about me when I really don't want them too.

Hopefully this link is lacking in some critical details in regards to seurity and privacy. It's one thing if I put info into a particular site, but very not cool if other sites can basically ask about me and get information back.

FWIW, it has been months since facebook's privacy settings made headlines. I think anyone that cares should have and likely has adjusted their privacy settings to keep unwanted information out. That, or taken the smarter path of keeping things they don't want others to see off of facebook

I'd consider myself pretty tech-savvy, and I'm still unsure how exactly to do that. The last I heard, I had to individually block each site that I didn't want my data shared with, and the only three I've seen mentioned are Yelp, Pandora, and Microsoft Docs. Is there some place I can monitor for new additions? Or is there a way I can just say, "block all apps by default unless I explicitly enable them?"

http://www.facebook.com/#!/settings/?tab=privacy&section...

Click "Edit your settings" down at the bottom left.

Click "Edit your settings" on the "Instant Personalization" setting.

Uncheck the box on the next page.

I've done that, but I was remembering some posts (e.g. http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/how-opt-out-facebook-s-...) that claimed that was insufficient. It seems it depends on how much you want to block; even if you opt out of instant personalization, the API will still let apps slurp some data through your friends (though not data deemed private), unless you've also explicitly blocked that app. The main thing missing seems to be a way to block all apps except a whitelisted set. You can blacklist apps, or you can opt out of apps entirely (there's a setting to turn off app access completely), but you can't block-by-default and then whitelist.

Hey there. I'm Austin Haugen, a product manager on the Facebook platform team. If you opt out of Instant Personalization by following the steps above, you will never receive an instantly personalized experience on these sites and we also block the sites for you, so when your friends arrive your information will not be accessible. This was a change we made in May based on user feedback.

I get:

[✓] Enable instant personalisation on partner websites. Note: instant personalisation is not yet available for you.

The tick is greyed out, so I guess it's not yet active. But I have no way of telling when it will become active, and no way of disabling it preemptively. Another reason to only log onto facebook in incognito/privacy mode.

It should work like for example location: with a popup asking me if it is OK to share my FB data with the given site.

It seems like the real challenge here is coming up with interesting and useful applications of this that also don't feel like 'Instant Creepoutification'. Weren't there Amazon badges/buttons on third party sites that included your name, some years ago? They seem to have gone out of style, maybe due to their inherent creepiness?

It's only creepy if the personalization is tacked on and out of place. If integration were done in a meaningful manner, for example if you were on a site and you wished you could see the site in the context of your social circle, then such integration probably wouldn't be creepy. It would done in such a way where the integration is part of the core value offer.

But say I'm reading an article and it says "your mother likes this too," well to me it doesn't add much to the site. So what's left is the creepy factor naked and exposed. I guess that's why there's the RFS: so we can find more useful integration of facebook. But as soon as it's useful no one will think creepy. Creepy is the ugly girl who stares at you, but the pretty one who does it isn't.

It's only creepy if the personalization is tacked on and out of place.

I'm not sure it's just that. A big factor in the creepy feeling is the unexpectedness. You don't, generally, expect most websites to know who you are and what your social circle is. And if they are, unexpectedly, it feels creepy. I understand that Facebook's idea is 'one day, it will be so common, it won't be creepy'. They may well be right but it seems like a tremendously high hurdle to overcome, to me.

Creepy is the ugly girl who stares at you, but the pretty one who does it isn't.

Forgive me for quoting Saturday Night Live[1] here, but I guess this a successful implementation of this feature boils down to:

- Be Handsome^W Usable

- Be Attractive

- Don't Be Unattractive

Really, those are rules that apply to any feature on any website. Nobody likes useless features.

[1] - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBVuAGFcGKY

Somehow I had been hoping that that kind of thing would become part of the browsers, giving me more control over the kind of data to give away. Isn't Mozilla working on something like that?

Still, of course everything has to live in the cloud, in case I switch my computer. So I guess Facebook simply took that market...

I wonder what would be a good way to give people their own private cloud? Perhaps CouchDB?

I'm wondering if Facebook will allow for an Instant Personalization partner to ask the user to opt-in before accessing the data. I love the idea of making things more fluid for those who want it, but I worry that this is the type of service that will alienate as many as it will endear.

You could be right about that, you could also be wrong. Do an A/B test and you will know.

Hi Paul,

My current company (thehotlist.com) has been working on what you asked in these two paragraphs for two years.

"Facebook began by testing Instant Personalization with a handful of popular existing sites. But the interesting question for us is: what new things could be built using it that couldn't even have existed before? What new things could you do if you already knew users and their friends the moment they arrived?

One obvious advantage is that it will decrease the friction of trying something new. That will make it easier to launch dramatically novel things. The problem with dramatic innovations is that users often don't understand what you've made till they try it. Now you'll just be able to show them."

Would you like to give me some feedback if you visited thehotlist.com?

And if anyone visits thehotlist.com and has questions to ask me about the experience in using Facebook as main data source, feel free to ask me.

Eugene Jen

You might want to submit a separate Ask HN post to review your site and post the link in this thread.

I'm not pg but I don't really understand this website. What does it do? I signed in and saw a map of my location. Tried to change my location, but no luck.

The name sounds like it's a list of something that's currently hot/cool or something like that, but it seems like a check-in thing (according to the interface)

Also, the font you are using in cufon doesn't have any foreign characters, so my name is displayed as:

Arnr Heiar Sigursson

when in fact it is:

Arnór Heiðar Sigurðsson

Thanks Arnór. This is very useful feedback because you are outside our test data point.

By the way, when you tried to change your location, did you try to type the location into the text box? Can I know what did you type so I can test on my end?

Yes, I did. I typed in "Mjoahlid 8, Reykjavik, Iceland", which works fine in google maps (I saw you were using google maps).

when I type that into your box it gets converted into "Capital Region, Iceland". Which is not very accurate :)

Since instant personalization is a pilot program and only open to select sites, anyone applying with this RFS in mind really couldn't have a working demo.

We do a real-time communication and relationship management (CRM) software and currently thinking of this RFS but would like to hear some feedback first.

First - our system lets businesses to invite their customers and prospects to the joint workspace (target customers are B2B companies. Facebook-like system - see screenshots here: http://blog.smartupz.com/2010/08/summary-of-key-elements-of-... ).

If the sales cycle is longer you have a lot of email chaos (both on sales team end and customer team end) and we help those teams to avoid that, build stronger relationship and maintain their own business social network. We also automatically track sales cycle progress based on the communication that is going on in the system.

And yes - we are using this right now and people prefer this to an email. It really works (because every action you make in the system sends an email notification it's not really such a huge workflow change).

Anyway - we see that Instant Personalization could improve shared customer workspace a lot: - customer could see "social proof" - who else in his social network did business with that company? And instantly ask for the reference. - auto avatar and contact info - Sales team could have instant info on what current customer likes (i.e. food, hobby etc.). This is a bit creepy but could speed up the sales cycle.

What do you think?

Not many b2b social networks are based on Facebook social relationships...

But there are humans working for b2b companies, no?

The problem I see with this is that the application I create will be dependent on Facebook's service, what if I want to use something else? what if my application is so successful that Facebook decides to create a service/app that does what mines does? This is the problem with building on top of existing services such as Twitter, Facebook, etc... I see the benefits these companies get by letting other developers test new "features", if they see something having some success then they just implement it themselves...

Does this RFS apply to any web application which integrates with Facebook in a mutually beneficial way, or specifically with instant personalization on a third party site (application's site)?

This particular RFS is for the more specific case of using Instant Personalization.

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