Bus error: Jake Billo’s weblog

As per CNet’s news.com post, Slide Inc, purveyor of useless Facebook fluff applications, has had a security breach and the “Top Friends” application has had its API key and listing pulled from the site. With one fell swoop, the MySpacization of Scary Stalkerbook was paused.

This is just a reminder that the developers of any Facebook application have full access to your profile. Privacy controls do not apply and any information that an app pulls is supposed to only be used for caching and removed within 24 hours. This was obviously not the case with Top Friends. By the way, if you have to provide additional profile information for a third-party application, they own that data and can use it in any way they see fit.

Of course, anyone reading this site will probably be well-informed about how applications work anyway - so you can instead gloat in glee at the fact that an overvalued startup with no useful product got slammed with the banhammer.

Facebook’s finally heard the hue and cry from all of those kids whose parents insist on “friending” them. You’re now able to restrict access to profile features and content based on specific users and groups of people, which I’ve promptly employed to sequester elementary and high school acquaintances away from viewing specific adventures.

I’d suggest you go ahead and update your settings, mostly because I could swear mine were more restrictive before the update was pushed.

Dramatic Whitespace. Bring some Zen to your profile.

I’ve actually added this one.

Update: Apparently the New York Times has profiled this one.

As Borat would say, very nice. Two bugs I’ve been keeping my eye on at the Facebook developer Bugzilla have received official attention.

Bug 724: Give users the option to control which app’s newsfeeds they want to see

and of course, my own submission:

Bug 721: Templatized actions should require link back to application page

I’m not sure how quickly these submissions will be implemented, but it’s good to get a response of sorts on them.

Whoever designed the “templatized feed push” action at Facebook for developers should be put on notice. My wall today is cluttered with ridiculously inane application pushes, and most of them link back to Slide or RockYou home pages - enabling them to track people’s referrers from the links. What’s worse in the matter is that there doesn’t seem to be any easy way to block them right from the feed.

Examples of these three-line messages:

1. Someone got a new post on their FunWall.
2. Someone scored higher than someone else on a quiz.
3. Someone is “like” someone else.

To save you all from having the most inane actions being pushed to your wall, I’m collecting several direct links to block the most annoying and idiotic applications from finding out anything about you. Applications that you’ve already restricted or blocked can be found from this page. I’ll update this page every time I find a new offender.

Note that these apps may not all push updates to your wall, but I’m sure you’ll agree that most of them are annoying as hell. You’ll still have to minimize them on your “friends’” pages, unfortunately.

Application: Likeness
What It Really Does: In an astonishing circlejerk of vanity and nepotism, apparently you’re similar to someone else.
Company to Blame: RockYou
Block It: I’m like the Angry Pirate!

Application: Causes
What It Really Does: Armchair activism at its finest.
Company to Blame: Project Agape
Block It: I support not hearing about your crap!

Application: Glitter Text
What It Really Does: Cheapens the clean design of Facebook.
Company to Blame: The developer isn’t visible. Perhaps they’re embarrassed about their creation, or perhaps they got banned for turning the site into Bling City.
Block It: hAy GuYs ThIs Is CoOoOoL!!!!!!!!111lollerskates

Application: Top Friends
What It Really Does: Makes the site like MySpace.
Company to Blame: Slide
Block It: Tom is not my friend.

Application: SuperPoke!
What It Really Does: Lets you virtually bitch-slap people, along with many other ridiculous actions.
Company to Blame: Slide
Block It: Jake has dropkicked Slide.

Application: HOT or NOT
What It Really Does: Remember when you’d rate people on a 1-10 scale that wasn’t “number of beers to drink before sleeping with this person”?
Company to Blame: HOTorNOT.com
Block It: I’m hot ’cause I’m fly. You ain’t ’cause you not.

Application: Moods
What It Really Does: Brings LiveJournal to Facebook.
Company to Blame: Some jerks at Berkeley, apparently.
Block It: I’m just a kid, and my life is a nightmare / I’m just a kid, and I know that it’s not fair (guess the song for mad shame!)

Application: Nicknames
What It Really Does: Nickname your friends and bring inside jokes to more than just Group Officer titles!
Company to Blame: A few Brandeis alumni. Yeah, I had to look up what the hell Brandeis was, apparently it’s a college in Waltham, MA.
Block It: I bestow upon your the nickname of ‘Pank’.

Application: FunWall
What It Really Does: You’re one click away from having all those Flash and MP3 embeds blare out of your speakers. Also, YOOOOOOUUUUUUTUUUUUBEEEEE VIDEOZ OMG LOL!
Company to Blame: Those Slide bastards again.
Block It: There’s nothing “fun” about Goatse on your profile.

I’ve made a few statements in the past - both in real life and online - about how certain Web sites seem to attract certain types of users and commenters. There’s a very clear relationship between the audience a site attracts and the comments contributed by users. One can clearly go from quality, interesting comments to spambots and txt-speak in a few clicks.

I may update this list as necessary, as new sites appear every day, but here’s my definitive Hierarchy of Internet Commenting. Rankings go from quality at the top to “I am dumber for having tried to read this” at the bottom.

1. Popular Web standards or technical discussion sites, such as A List Apart or flagship sites in the 9rules network. Sometimes the comments can definitely stray into pretentious quibbling, but for the most part they’re insightful and offer decent advice to Web designers and developers:
2. Something Awful Forums: The content of discussion at SA may be highly ridiculous, but it’ll be written well and intelligently. There’s a reason that several industry insiders post there. A $10 registration fee acts as an initial gatekeeper, and a few ban-hammer wielding administrators take care of anyone foolish enough to use ‘lulz’ in a post or reply.
3. Newsgroups: general discussion. Most newsgroups take a bad reputation because of the inherent community of trolls, but even the troll posts are generally well-written. People may be fairly snippy, as per below, but you’ll generally get the correct answer if you’re thick skinned.
4. Slashdot. Posts without merit are taken care of by the moderation system, and the standard of written English is very high even though there’s no specific enforcement of it. There are some Internet memes present in most discussions, but these posts are likely lead to genuinely funny responses. Posters on Slashdot also have a significantly higher degree of technical knowledge than the average bear (or Internet user), so responses to questions are likely to receive a correct response in a shorter timespan.Comical or humorous posts - even the first one in a discussion - have likely already analyzed the situation and provided commentary on it:

   

5. General-interest blogs. Sites like Gizmodo, Engadget, Kotaku, Joystiq and all others owned by Gawker Media and Weblogs, Inc. have dedicated staff policing their comment fields. Unfortunately, there’s not much enforcement of post quality - simply that there’s no trolling and people tend to stay on topic. Additionally, it’s clear that certain topics attract people without the technical knowledge to respond properly. These people respond anyways, forking the discussion and causing needless debate, when a snappy “You’re an idiot and here’s why, with proof” response would curtail the issue. A certain amount of sarcasm is necessary, in my opinion, to separate the idiots from people who actually do know something.
6. Facebook popular applications walls: This is where we start devolving into really horrible discussions of who is popular and who is clearly not. The picture alone should be sufficient to tell you that the quality of discussion definitely has gone down a bar:
7. Digg: I thought the site’s newly introduced ranking system would keep discussions a bit more technically involved.I thought wrong - apparently that damn “cheezburger” meme is still worth displaying:

   

8. YouTube comments are filled with the most ignorant, racist invective I’ve ever seen online. I found these attached to a “most popular” video on the front page of the site:
9. And last but not least, any MySpace comments - simply because they’re 90% ads for “free” ringtones or profile tracking scripts. I’ll leave the image off this site here, but you know where to look for examples.

Have any other sites with good or horrible comments? Disagree with my ordering? Feel free to comment here, but please keep it at a Kotaku-or-above level.

Observe:

It burns. Taylor Phelps of Charleston High School, you are hereby banned from any social networking sites other than MyCesspool.

Over the past few days I’ve seen a plethora of really inane applications on my Facebook news feed. At this point, I primarily use the site for stalking other people, since I get any relevant status updates and private messages sent over to my cell phone.

Seriously, though, “Glitter Text”? “X Me”? These sorts of items encourage banal, MySpace-esque pages cluttered with about fifty extra boxes, causing extra page load time and bandwidth usage. If you don’t believe me about these particular items, check their comment pages out in the application directory. You’ll see the worst CAPS LOCK IS CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL, nd txtspeak lyk dis offenders this side of NewsCorp’s abortion of a social portal.

(Keep in mind that the following screenshot is from “Honesty Box”, an application that specifically allows anonymous commenting on your profile.)

That’s by far not the worst of it. The “X Me” application, a utility that lets you supplement the standard “poke” action with custom text, immediately attracted people who thought adding ‘fuck’ would be just an EXCELLENT idea. Never mind the fact that your profile is public, says you’re 12 and go to middle school; “FUCK” would be just a great idea and hilarious.

Christ almighty.

People wonder why pedophiles are having an easier time of it these days.

What’s more, is when I go to block these applications from appearing, I get the message that “This will not prevent you from seeing application if other people have it installed.” What a pathetic cop-out; I don’t want your 96Kbps Fergie MP3’s even beginning to think about loading on my box.

Anyone with me on this?