Terminally Incoherent

Most of you probably know about Ze Frank. If you don’t you should go and watch The Show right now. It was one of the most insightful, hilarious and nutty online shows that I have ever seen. It was not really a vlog (btw, who the hell came up with the word vlog? It sounds like someone throwing up), but something else. It is an important bit in the history of online hilarity and you don’t want to be the person who doesn’t get the jokes about duckies, giant babies and etc.

Anyway, I found it amusing that Ze’s latest exploit was a classic bit of social engineering. Ze asked his fans, readers and followers to let him borrow their Facebook profile for a month. During that month he would maintain their profile, make status updates, post on people’s walls and generally pretend to be you based on the notes you provided him. I guess the idea was to expose how your online persona can easily be disassociated from you without anyone noticing. Interesting concept and the person who participated in this experiment admitted that she sort of wished that Ze would take her online identity into new bold directions she never considered. And he sort of did, by flirting with her “crush of the moment” as she described it.

What kills me though is that people actually allowed Ze to do this. And that they sent him their login information en masse:

Last month i asked people on twitter whether they would allow me to take over their facebook accounts for a week. Within a half hour I had to remove the request due to the volume of incoming username and passwords.

I’m amazed, and terrified by this at the same time. I know that we live in a society that worships celebrities the same way ancient Greeks worshiped their promiscuous, quarreling, unruly gods. So I guess it should be no surprise that if a celebrity (even a minor online one) asks people for their login information, his loyal fans will be more than happy to provide. Still, it frightens me.

Personally I don’t care who you are - you can be the emperor of the universe for all I care but if you ask me for my password my answer will be the same as to anyone else: “GO TO HELL!” Sharing your login information for any online service or email is a horrible idea.

I’m not sure whether or not Ze realizes this (but I suspect he might), and whether or not his fans ever even considered it but this was classic social engineering. Using a gimmick to weasel out personal information from a group of people. All the people who sent him their password they got duped. Naturally I’m sure Ze is a responsible person, and he had no malicious intent but he could easily turn around and cash in on his fans trust by selling their login info to Facebook spammers. Would his fans know? Would they even be able to connect total pwnage of their accounts with the fact they sent their login info to a complete stranger over an unencrypted protocol? I don’t know. Half of them would probably never figure it out. The fact they gave away their info so easily and willingly is just scary, and underlines how little value people put on privacy these days.

It disturbs me to no end that the person who participated in the experiment actually viewed it as a positive experience. I guess she doesn’t realize it yet. She gave a complete stranger access to her facebook account allowing him to explore her personal correspondence and all sorts of private and semi-private information along with a written guideline on how to act like her on Facebook. Who knows what he could dig out with this information. Could he figure out her other passwords and secret questions based on her friend list, and her private emails (you know, name of your dog, name of your childhood friend and etc)? A skillful social engineer could take that account and milk it for information potentially leading to an all out identity theft (“hey mom, what was my social security number? I forgot. Send it to my facebook!”).

Which brings me to a question for you. Do you share passwords with anyone? Can anyone except you log into your email, social media or your desktop? Personally I am very conscious about electronic privacy and I will not give my passwords to anyone. Not even my closest family. No one except me gets to read my email and use my social media profiles. I’m even in a habit of locking my workstation when I leave my desk even if I’m home alone. Not that I have anything to hide (well, except maybe the pr0n folder) but I personally believe that everyone should have a certain degree of personal privacy - even in close personal relationships.

I believe that your personal email, your social media accounts and the contents of your hard drive are off-limits to me. I have no business looking through them - and in fact I have no interest in what I might find there. I know people who either have their girlfriend’s/boyfriend’s email/facebook/myspace password or gave her/him theirs (or both). To me that sort of thing implies an alarming lack of trust, and excessive jealousy in the relationship. I personally believe that it is much healthier to simply respect each other’s privacy and have trust in the other person. Healthier, and more secure - because if you won’t give your password to your significant other, then you will be less likely to give it to Ze Frank or that Nigerian prince who promised you 10% of his wealth if you just hook him up with your pin number.

Every day I get a bunch of application invitations on Facebook to join some new crazy little thing. There is a septillion of apps on facebook, and the funny thing is that half of them are the same exact thing, just implemented in slightly different way. For example, there are around 20 different “poke” applications, multitude of “wall” replacements. There are also few dozen “Courses App” replacements, but they all mostly suck.

The abundance of silly fun apps like super-pokes, super-walls and etc is not that bad. You just use what your friends use and have fun with it. You could say that users are actually benefiting from the abundance of them giving us a better Facebook experience. Then again, it’s kinda annoying. For one it clutters facebook profiles and makes them look more and more like MySpace pages every day. I liked the clean, and lean design even if it was a tad spartan. But that’s just me - I like simplicity.

Then again, I’m a blogger. I express myself by writing these long ass posts that put most of normal people to sleep around the end of the first paragraph. (I’m not saying you guys are not normal - it’s just that people who comment here seem to be smarter than the average facebook or myspace profile owner.) Other people express themselves by adding more blinkenlights to their profile.

Btw, my favorite question is: “hey, did you hear my new myspace song?”. No of course I didn’t. Apparently you didn’t pay attention when I told you that I have myspace music disabled. Seriously, browsing MySpace without these mandatory greasemonkey plugins is like going back in into the 90’s and browsing the geocities pages with the ubiquitous embedded MIDI’s.

And then there is the redundancy. Am I the only person who sees no difference between the snowball fight, pillow fight, pie fight, dodge ball, tag game, ping pong and the “poke” type application? They are essentially all the same - you send a notification to the other user, and they send one back to you. All of this could be handled by a single central “poke” application. In fact, the Super Poke already supports custom “pokes” where you can actually specify your own action by typing it into a text box. But, since not everyone is using that app, every once in a while someone gets a bright idea.

Hey, how about we make a Facebook app where people could like flick poop at each other. I know, I know all those custom poke apps already let you do things like that, but this one will be better cause we will have cool monkey icons, and we will keep statistics on how many grams of poop you flung, and had flung back at you. That’d be cool, right?

Sigh…

The services which help you to connect with people such as that Courses application suffer even more from this type decentralization. The decision to remove the core Courses app diluted the value of this service. What is the point of having course tracking if your classmates are spread thin over 20 different implementations. I guess the hope was that one of these apps would become dominant one but that did not happen. They are all equally useless. Is there any point in using 6 different courses apps to keep track of people in your classes 5 users at a time?

I’m all for freedom, and I love having choices. I think the whole paradox of choice thing is bullshit. The only people who are confused by having too many choices are those who don’t care enough to do their research. But with social apps you also need to worry about stuff like user base. To many choices dilute the user base. If you are producing a text editor, an OS or a database you may be content to cater exclusively to a very small niche market. The value of your product is not associated with the size of your user base.

On the other hand if you are creating an application that is supposed to help people to interact with eachother on a social network, then the value of your app can be directly measured by the size of your user base. Who needs a networking app that only has 20 users?

What is the solution here? Let’s borrow methodology from the open source community - or more specifically from Linux distributors. How do they deal with the multitude of redundant applications out there? They cherry pick the apps they like and bundle them with the OS. Users are free to install their own and change the defaults, and add more but they get a set of solid popular applications they could start with. Facebook should do the same.

They should embrace the most successful apps and make them part of a “featured applications” package. All the featured apps would be automatically enabled on the new profiles. Existing users would get a notification when an app is added or dropped from the featured list. They should also deprecate their original services and replace them with featured apps. So when Facebook dropped “Courses” they should have picked a popular course app and say “hey, we are deprecating our old courses feature, but you should try this one instead”. Same goes for the Wall and Poke applications - pick the best one, and replace the old system with it.

How would you choose the featured apps? I don’t know - perhaps facebook team could just pick apps which they thing fit the most with their site based on the feature set, user base, support and communication with the authors. Perhaps they could ask the community to vote on apps in different categories. Perhaps set a user base threshold - if you reach a million of users, you automatically get featured. If two apps of the same time both have a million of users then we either pick one, or make the community choose.

How many apps should be on the featured list? I would say no more than 10. You want to have representative apps from each of the popular categories such as the pokes, the walls, course tracking and etc.. The point is to cover the most ground in the least amount of applications. Add too many, and you run into duplicates and dilute value again.

Implementing a featured list give us both the choice, as well as a baseline of useful apps with large user base which provide lots of value to end users. I really think this is the best way to go at this point.

I said it before, and I’ll say it again. MySpace is the new Geocities. It’s the place where everyone takes their first steps in web design, creating very shitty looking pages. The default layout is a revolting abomination built with few dozen levels of improperly nested tables. I once plugged it into the W3C HTML validator, and I shit you not, it punched me in the face for sending it such mangled code. To add insult to injury the popular thing nowadays is for users to inject malformed CSS into the body of their profile producing the ugliest shit on earth. It seems that chief MySpace design rule is: if you can read the text without highlighting it, it’s not done yet.

For some inexplicable reason most MySpace users absolutely love, ugly, cluttered, unreadable profiles. You can whine and complain but they are not going to listen. Ugly ass myspace pages that hurt your eyes, and provoke cause nausea and are here to stay. But there is a solution. There is a way to browse myspace without subjecting yourself to the shitty layouts and musing. There are two things you need to accomplish this:

1. Firefox
2. Greasemonkey

One thing that I hate more than the shitty page layouts is shitty music blaring at me from a page with a shitty layout. Auto-play is fucking inconsiderate, annoying and evil. And of course it is the default for MySpace media player. This is why I use the Automatic MySpace Media Remover script. It disables the flash media player by default, and replaces it with a placeholder. You can bring it back by clicking on it.

Then there is the matter of ugly ass layouts. We can make them go away with greasemonkey as well. Personally, I use the Custom Layout Dis/Enable which actually gives you a button in the upper right corner that you can hit to strip the site out of layout. If you don’t like it, there are several other similar scripts like this one, or even this one.

Now, if I could only have a Stupidity Filter script or plugin, MySpace would actually be a nice website to visit.

As you may or may not know, Facebook removed it’s course tracking application at the beginning of August. Apparently this was done in order to make more room for home-grown facebook apps. I didn’t notice it until yesterday when I decided I would stalk my prospective students. I guess I just started mentally filtering out all the news stories with the keyword “Facebook App” in them in the last few months.

For one, I do not understand this decision. This type of applications only work well if everyone is using the same one. When the functionality was built in, everyone was on the same page so to speak. If you entered in your courses, you were immediately connected with all the other students who did the same.

Currently, users have to pick between 6 or 7 popular course tracking apps (and new ones are popping up every day it seems) - all of which are essentially walled gardens. Where once there was unified user base, we now have fractured clusters spread over multiple domains. If you install one of them, and your friends installs another you will never know that you are in the same class. So which one do you join? Do you join them all?

I tried several, and the 3 top ones had major scalability problems. They were all slow, and one of them basically refused to display anything but an error message. It appears that these things are hosted on 3rd party web servers that are in no way shape or form capable of dealing with Facebook grade bandwidth onslaught. So the choice now seems to be reduced to either using a popular app which is consistently down due to a unintentional DDOS, or a more obscure one that has no active users. I’d rather have basic no-frills functionality than a feature rich environment that doesn’t work, or lacks users.

By liberating the course tracking functionality, Facebook essentially killed the whole idea of easily connecting with your classmates that made their social network so popular and quickly adopted. Yes, I do understand that the network is not just for college students anymore, but that is no reason to remove the functionality that attracted students to this network in the first place. Welcome to Myspace 2.0 kids. That’s where Facebook is heading.