Comments on: Facebook Diss|Like: Designing Digital Warning Signs

By: transvio

transvio — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 02:28:08 +0000

dive into information techology

By: Learn Wordpress

Learn Wordpress — Sun, 16 May 2010 10:44:43 +0000

Great post. Very refreshing given all the duplicate content out there. Thanks for doing something original.

By: karl

karl — Thu, 06 May 2010 02:56:15 +0000

The issue is a lot worse than you think.
You do not have to click the Like Button to be identified.

If you have a facebook account, FB knows each page (containing a like button) you have visited *without* actually clicking on it.

http://media-tech.blogspot.com/2010/05/social-plug-ins-and-like-button-insane.html

By: Jeffrey

Jeffrey — Wed, 05 May 2010 19:57:00 +0000

Great post. I, too, was conflicted about the announcement of Open Graph. After a few weeks of thought, I voted with my profile by deleting last night. This is an interesting summary by the Electronic Frontier Foundation of Facebook’s eroding privacy policy: http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline

When viewed like that, all at once as a timeline, the choice was easy for me make.

By: gilgul

gilgul — Wed, 05 May 2010 19:28:00 +0000

I actually don’t think the answer is clear. Because the individual is not truly bulimic, nor do I want to provide more visibility to a wider audience. Just like the FB newsfeed provided more visibility to little actions people made on Facebook (created massive protest at first, but then proved to be quite useful), I think that as a web creator/entrepreneur there are certainly super interesting scenarios that can leverage Facebook data. The majority of them deal with showing you information that your friends have posted. This is only your view, and supposedly cannot be seen by others (here’s where the part about user settings gets complex).

The scary part is how easily hackable the whole ecosystem is. I’ll definitely be following this to see all awkward ways people get associated with entities and communities they have no connection to…!

By: Mushon

Mushon — Wed, 05 May 2010 15:38:32 +0000

You would not wave a sandwich in front of a bulimic individual, so as a developer why would you use a system that you know takes advantage of people’s weaknesses and conceals its true effects from them? The answer is clear – because you want a part of what FB wants – more content visibility to a wider audience. I agree it’s a tough one, but if you are positioning yourself in opposition to FB’s moves, it is hard to also join them by helping acheive their objectives.

On the other issue, I am not claiming publicness is not a social context, I’m just claiming it’s a less cohesive one. It is basically along the lines of the differences between a “community” and a “public”. (bottom up/top down)

Interesting stuff, no doubt.

By: Gilad

Gilad — Wed, 05 May 2010 15:19:47 +0000

Interface terrorism – interesting term Mushon! Haven’t heard it before, but certainly adequate.

I disagree that a more public context means less social. It is just NOT what we all as users signed up for. As a developer, I am seriously considering playing with the new APIs. Technologically, I truly see huge potential for innovation adding personalized-social layers to websites. But morally, I am careful to engage. True, wouldn’t want to drop my users into social potholes and am carefully analyzing risks now before taking any action.

While I agree that Facebook as platform has been hurt by its disrespect of user’s privacy and all the bad press it is getting, I think that is not enough to make people stop. Additionally, there’s still a wide majority of users who don’t realize just how public they currently are, and probably will never do so. Like I wrote, due to the fact that the “dangerous implications” are mostly long-term.

By: Mushon

Mushon — Wed, 05 May 2010 12:45:14 +0000

Maliciously wrapping a “like” button you place in a Care Bears website in an actual KKK website iFrame should be pretty easy to do and would definitely lead to some scary results. It might be something that FB prevent but off the top of my head I am not 100% sure they can.

You would still need to place that trickery hack on your site so the manipulative one would be the site host. Indeed interface terrorism is an interesting path for resistance.

You are talking about the social context potential of using FB’s new tools, but is it really viable? The platform in itself has been hurt by its disrespect for it’s users’ privacy. For me Facebook has lost it’s social context, as I wrote last week in a post titled “Relationship: It’s Complicated“.

Maybe the users wouldn’t care and I agree that as you say: “the fun of social interaction trumps the thought about potential future uncomfort”. But as soon as we adopt this broken social context platform, that future uncomfort is something we’re invested in and are responsible for. While we all want more traffic there are differnt intimacies and social networks that gather around our content outside of FB. By becoming so unintimate (if not to say anti-intimate) FB has defined a context of it’s own which if much more public (=less social context) and cannot be easily slapped into other web contexts and be expected to result in an automatic net gain.

If we are savvy enough to understand the social potholes why would WE want to drop our users into them and fall right after them ourselves?