Prolific Programmer on the Internets!

Alan was on about packing lists tonight -- the "what would you need for a trip" variety. Now as readers know, I'm a big fan of crowdsourcing. I realised that this was a perfect test-case for my hypothesis. Basically, you leverage one's Facebook contacts to build a packing list. Presumably, things I tend to forget are not the same as those that Alan tends to forget which is not the same as Midori tends to forget which isn't the same as Marta or Maria tend to forget.

This established, I came up with a preliminary database schema, which is pasted below:

I'd love to hear any additions. Basically, a user has many items, which are shared among users. So, one of my ten subscribers using Google Reader should be able to input some information to make this an easier task.

According to Michelle, Facebook is rolling out a new interface to user profiles, but I can't get to it. Tareeq -- help a friend out, won't you?

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It works now. Thanks, whomever did it.

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.

I like Facebook -- I really do. I've reconnected with a whole host of my old friends through it from grade school and college. However, the API falls short. Why? The email box is protected. I can get the number of messages on the wall, but not their actual content. Guys, please make everything two-way. Further make the sample code you have reflect that. Many thanks!

I use Ad Block Plus to block adverts on the Internet. The latest entry into this space is Facebook's Beacon. So, I figured out how to block adverts. Simply add http://*.facebook.com/beacon* and 'lo and behold, no more Facebook adverts!

Remember my previous speculation that the winners from the opensocial announcement would be the ones who deliver a bridge API? Well, Opensocket did just that!

I'm realising that, contrary to what I usually say, I do have many friends. It's just that they aren't here, which has long been a complaint of mine. Oh well, these things take time.

Valleywag reports that Facebook employees have been playing willy-nilly with privacy controls. I once logged onto Facebook to find my profile had been changed from Roman characters to Chinese. I were actually logged in as someone else. This happened only once. But, it would have been trivial if I were so inclined to add this person to my friends list and approve it and then stalk them. I could, using the Facebook API, add a malicious application to modify the profile to list something else, sabotage their relationship, etc. etc. Fortunately, it's not in me nature to do this sort of thing, but unfortunately, everyone doesn't share me nature.

Another social networking post. My lord (Vader, natch, not the Palestenian bastard), the first thing I do every morning is wake up, make me way over to me laptop or (increasingly) pick up my mobile, check SMS, check Email, Twitter, and Facebook.

Ok, enough of me describing my latest addiction, onto the post. Even if Facebook doesn't join, their liberal terms of use for their API means that a third-party developer could write a bridge between the Facebook API and OpenSocial.

The developer that does this, would have a goldmine -- I'm putting money on Slide or Rock You to do this. They probably already have wrappers internally, but the first one to make such a wrapper public will own the roost.

This post, triggered by Marc, is about the broader topic of "open" standards. What are they? Who adopts them? And how open are they really?

A standard is defined by interoperability. Whose interest is this interoperability in? Is it in the organisation with 80% of the market? No, it's in the interest of the other 20% (for now). If successful, the open standard will turn the 80% player into just another provider, without anything special that it can impose on users. Whether an open standard will be successful or not remains an open question. Hopefully, this entry will lead a reader to have an "aha" moment and share it with the rest of us.

Although they are in denial about this, Microsoft has lost their monopoly. How this happened is of instructive value. It started in 1993 with the first platform-level threat to the company, from Netscape. However, while Netcape did unveil a new platform, it sat on top of the Microsoft-controlled Windows operating system. So, it was able to swallow this threat. But it showed the way to beat Microsoft, and future competitors picked up on this. The most successful of these are Google and Yahoo, which expanded the platform and made Microsoft a niche player -- and the services were based on an "open" standard, HTTP. Now that they are the big men on the block, they are making moves to have proprietary APIs for accessing their services.

The instant messaging space will serve as my second example. For years, America Online was the leader in the space. AOL used predatory practises to maintain their lead (including blocking third-party clients). The Jabber foundation, started to promote a standards-based interoperability between instant messaging, was adopted by few competitors, but quietly so. When Google Talk announced, it made no secret that it was built on Jabber and that anyone could write a client for it, and so on, so forth. This eventually forced AOL to open their network because they'd seen the threat too late.

Now for a failure, the network computer. The promise was that it would interoperate with every vendor except Microsoft. Sun, IBM, and Oracle were the three big companies behind the effort, which soon crashed and burned.

In conclusion, minority players in a market can adopt (temporary) open-standards to gain market share vis a vis the market leader. Eventually, the theory goes, enough users/developers will see the advantage of the open-standard and sheer market force will make the market leader play nice. How to tell if a given "open" standard will be successful remains an open question.

Andy Beale writes:

A social network that already has all of the pieces in place: email, instant messaging, blogs, image and video sharing. If Google really wanted to own a social network, it could take the $240M it just saved and put that towards building a kick-ass one. A few rumors, closed beta invites, and denials of competing with MySpace later, and the whole world's going crazy over Google Connect (or whatever they want to call it).

I guess Beale forgot about Orkut (no, don't feel bad, Andy, you aren't the only one). Google has more money than the entire middle east, save for Qatar, who have more money than God.