Prolific Programmer on the Internets!

Many people seem to think Facebook is a privacy nightmare. Well, BBC confirmed it:

When you add an application, unless you say otherwise, it is given access to most of the information in your profile. That includes information you have on your friends even if they think they have tight security settings.

While we could not get all details, what we did get, included his name, hometown, school, interests and photograph, would certainly help us to steal someone's identity.

When does the other shoe drop, ie when will my carrot realise that Facebook is a bad idea?

According to Facebook lexicon, Barack Obama has more buzz on Facebook than John Mccain. Ok, it's not a very scientific poll, but at least its methodology is transparent.

First Scoble, now Yoko.

Lunch found me in downtown Mountain View with Ted, from Meebo, who informed me that Rock You and Slide must expend 30% of their effort to port any application from Facebook to Open Social. I'm certain the people at both companies have heard of XSLT? Indeed Mr Ayers has a partial XSLT for the OpenSocial API! I'll try to further it over the weekend.

The Scobleizer announces that he's blocked on facebook. Why? From the horse's mouth:

My account has been "disabled" for breaking Facebook's Terms of Use. I was running a script that got them to keep me from accessing my account.

I wonder if he's working with Hugh to move his social graph off Facebook. Inquiring minds want to know.

DavidNYC is on about how Facebook makes it difficult to delete accounts. I'd imagine that David has not tried to get out of linkedin.

Americans are notoriously clueless about the world. They are all on Facebook. Now, if Zuckerberg and Co want to do a public service, they ought to add the NYTimes quiz app to every new account. Sure, I'd prefer a different news outlet, but the Times is a decent start. Also, I take the quiz blind, without reading the Times, out of principle.

Go here to get a list of your Facebook friends as a phonebook. What would be more useful would be having the information available in different formats (my phone understands VCARD, but I'll get it outputting XML with any luck), so ATOM would be best, but Facebook is insisting on keeping itself a walled garden. Hey, maybe OpenSocial will open this information up?

LMAO!

Mates, there it is... Privacy trumped facebook, as Beacon was rolled back, I'm not removing my Beacon filter yet, however.