Facebook screws iFart author | Hacker News Reader

Facebook screws iFart author

scobleizer.com

24 pointsbdfh4224 comments

It's the tyranny of the cloud. You trust Facebook with your personal contacts, Gmail with your mail, and YouTube with your videos until the day a nameless admin script decides you crossed an unwritten threshold and dumps your account into the bit bucket. I don't trust anything of importance to someone else's service, especially Facebook.

Why especially Facebook? Because of the code leak (and abysmal code quality) a while back?

The code must not be that abysmal, considering how much it handles. When you make a separate load request just to poke somebody, when Chat is constantly making requests, then you've got to have code that's handling itself pretty well. And the end results are gorgeous compared to most any other site.

Perhaps especially Facebook because of that silly "Facebook is run by the CIA" video a while back?

wasn't http://www.iqt.org/ one of Facebook's earliest investors?

"tyranny of the cloud." I like the phrase. Coin that shit.

Interesting that the iFart author was not just a random lucky hacker. Also, despite all his other accomplishments, he will from now on be known as the iFart author? I hope for his sake that it won't be like that, but I guess there is a lesson in that somewhere...

Yes, I think it's odd that the submitted post, and its SEO link title, mention iFart as that Facebook user's most noteworthy accomplishment, when he has done other things that are more significant and perhaps more relevant to why his Facebook friends count is so large.

Perhaps there would be mileage in an app (or browser plugin or Evernote mashup etc) that created backups of your Facebook data in some way.

Impetus / further example: A friend of mine took the decision to remove himself from social networks for privacy reasons. While I respect his decision and motivation, the loss of comments on our holiday photos from his albums was a real shame.

Further application: 1. Access to historical data/ versioning of your own and others pages (ahem, all sorts privacy issues there). 2. Those popular map-the-people-i-know graphics could be created as videos showing growth over time. 3. Generating a Lulu book from the collected data (I think we all know at least one Facebook addict who would love this).

Of course the irony is that Facebook would likely have ban you for using anything that mined your account at any sort of interval. To avoid suspicion it would need to be "watching" (or mimicking) your regular access and saving the juicy bits rather than logging in for you and crawling.

What we need is a decentralized, XMPP-or-similar-based Facebook clone that you could own. I'm not a Facebook expert but I've been shoulder-surfing as my wife uses it and I see little that could not be cloned in this manner.

Facebook itself is almost entirely unnecessary, and not with "pie in the sky" technology that may exist someday... it could be done right now.

Any concrete ideas on how to implement that idea? Sounds really interesting.

It's technically so easy it's hard to even make it take long to describe. Define XMPP pubsub nodes that correspond to the events of interest. Create a client that subscribes to these nodes and translates them into web events. This is probably a good time to consider a non-SQL based backend.

Personally, I'd do it all in the context of ejabberd + yaws using Mnesia. If I'm feeling particularly saucy, I would use comet-connections to make all the events live, not just "chat". (That's an advantage you would get from the web server and XMPP server being in one (OS) process; the same event can very, very easily trigger both XMPP handling and some JS shipped down to a user with one handler.) I would actually not bother scaling to umpty-bajillion users, the entire idea for people to actually own their implementation and for there to be bajillions of implementations out there.

I could pretty much spec this in my sleep and implementation wouldn't be that much harder. The thing is... that's not the hard part. The hard part is getting people to use it, and "I provide a hosting service for the first few thousand people and create a de facto point of centralization" rather defeats the point. I have no idea how to address that step.

I use PhotoBook (http://www.caffeinatedcocoa.com/photobook/index.html) to add photos I like into iPhoto. Now that '09 lets you sync automatically, it looks like perhaps that won't be needed either.

My gut reaction is that people like Scoble with "5000 friends" are abusing the service, and that when they combine that abuse with mass messaging, it's easy to see why Facebook would react.

Exactly. Facebook is only useful for keeping in contact with your friends as long as the connectivity graph of your friends actually only includes real friends.

If a friend posts a status update, and a friend of that friend comments, you see the comment. The likelihood you will see comments from some random person you will never meet increases by the sum of fake friends of all of your friends.

Even if you have say, 100 real friends, but each of them has ~5 fake friends, you are exposed to comments from 500 random strangers.

You may be right, but I've never seen it happen. I have over 600 "friends", many of which I've conversed with online, but none of whom have commented, posted, or tagged me on -anything-. The exception being the people whom I've met in person.

Did you even read the article?

Replying to people who contacted you first is not mass messaging.

Yes. Starting with his ~5000th "friend", he began the routine process of sending messages to people who tried to friend him. Apparently, he sent a lot of these messages. I am not surprised Facebook cut him off. He's using a social network designed to track acquiantances as a tool for propagating content to people he's never even spoken to.

Yeah -- IMHO, having 5000 friends on Facebook is borderline abuse of the service just by itself.

Absolutely agreed. Scoble's always written like Facebook is a tool for marketers. It's not. It was built for college kids. For real-life friends. It was designed to supplement your existing real-life network. And Facebook's got the right to deny you if you use it for anything else.

But but... this guy is a "social media expert" ...

Possible fix: institute a "real" friend limit that is reasonably low. If a user has reached the limit, subsequent requestees are automatically added to a fan page. Allow the user to swap people between the two. Facebook's fan pages, updates etc keep a good balance between marketing & spam... this would enforce the use of them.

Am I the only person who thinks the author really missed a headline opportunity by not using "iFart author thinks that Facebook policy stinks"?

I use Facebook only because my friends are on it. I like the ease of access Facebook provides to people I like, but this has more to do with it being the most-used social site. Facebook itself sucks and I would do very gross things to make a living before I would have Mark Zuckerberg as a boss.

Facebook isn't perfect, but it's not a sucky site. It's streamlined and efficient, it runs very quickly (especially compared to MySpace or Bebo or Hi5), and it's got a surprisingly slim history of messing things up for people. Yeah, it gets in trouble, but Facebook deals with hundreds of millions of accounts, and it does a pretty damn good job at all of that. Compare to MySpace, which has had incidents of murders, suicides, massive spam, site breakages, page breakages, and a week-long removal of "gay" statuses from their websites, and Facebook's track record is incredible. They've got an impressive team.

I've also written to a person who works at Facebook, and he says it's a pretty good job with some brilliant co-workers.

I'd be willing to bet that Facebook reinstates this account, similar to the way they reinstated Scoble's. And this is a way way edge case: most people don't write to 900 not-friends. I'm sure Facebook's spam filter picked that up, but I'm just as sure that in a week's time this account will be back and running.

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