

Facebook screws iFart author - bdfh42
http://scobleizer.com/2009/01/24/facebook-kicks-off-ifart-author-for-having-too-many-friends/

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snorkel
It's the tyranny of the cloud. You trust Facebook with your personal contacts,
Gmail with your mail, and YouTube with your videos until the day a nameless
admin script decides you crossed an unwritten threshold and dumps your account
into the bit bucket. I don't trust anything of importance to someone else's
service, especially Facebook.

~~~
c1sc0
Why especially Facebook? Because of the code leak (and abysmal code quality) a
while back?

~~~
unalone
The code must not be that abysmal, considering how much it handles. When you
make a separate load request just to poke somebody, when Chat is constantly
making requests, then you've got to have code that's handling itself pretty
well. And the end results are gorgeous compared to most any other site.

Perhaps especially Facebook because of that silly "Facebook is run by the CIA"
video a while back?

~~~
jfornear
wasn't <http://www.iqt.org/> one of Facebook's earliest investors?

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Tichy
Interesting that the iFart author was not just a random lucky hacker. Also,
despite all his other accomplishments, he will from now on be known as the
iFart author? I hope for his sake that it won't be like that, but I guess
there is a lesson in that somewhere...

~~~
tokenadult
Yes, I think it's odd that the submitted post, and its SEO link title, mention
iFart as that Facebook user's most noteworthy accomplishment, when he has done
other things that are more significant and perhaps more relevant to why his
Facebook friends count is so large.

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matthias
Perhaps there would be mileage in an app (or browser plugin or Evernote mashup
etc) that created backups of your Facebook data in some way.

Impetus / further example: A friend of mine took the decision to remove
himself from social networks for privacy reasons. While I respect his decision
and motivation, the loss of comments on our holiday photos from his albums was
a real shame.

Further application: 1\. Access to historical data/ versioning of your own and
others pages (ahem, all sorts privacy issues there). 2\. Those popular map-
the-people-i-know graphics could be created as videos showing growth over
time. 3\. Generating a Lulu book from the collected data (I think we all know
at least one Facebook addict who would love this).

Of course the irony is that Facebook would likely have ban you for using
anything that mined your account at any sort of interval. To avoid suspicion
it would need to be "watching" (or mimicking) your regular access and saving
the juicy bits rather than logging in for you and crawling.

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jerf
What we _need_ is a decentralized, XMPP-or-similar-based Facebook clone that
you could _own_. I'm not a Facebook expert but I've been shoulder-surfing as
my wife uses it and I see little that could not be cloned in this manner.

Facebook itself is almost entirely unnecessary, and not with "pie in the sky"
technology that may exist someday... it could be done right now.

~~~
Rod
Any concrete ideas on how to implement that idea? Sounds really interesting.

~~~
jerf
It's technically so easy it's hard to even make it take long to describe.
Define XMPP pubsub nodes that correspond to the events of interest. Create a
client that subscribes to these nodes and translates them into web events.
This is probably a good time to consider a non-SQL based backend.

Personally, I'd do it all in the context of ejabberd + yaws using Mnesia. If
I'm feeling particularly saucy, I would use comet-connections to make all the
events live, not just "chat". (That's an advantage you would get from the web
server and XMPP server being in one (OS) process; the same event can very,
very easily trigger both XMPP handling and some JS shipped down to a user with
one handler.) I would actually not bother scaling to umpty-bajillion users,
the entire idea for people to actually own their implementation and for there
to be bajillions of implementations out there.

I could pretty much spec this in my sleep and implementation wouldn't be that
much harder. The thing is... that's not the hard part. The hard part is
getting people to use it, and "I provide a hosting service for the first few
thousand people and create a de facto point of centralization" rather defeats
the point. I have no idea how to address that step.

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tptacek
My gut reaction is that people like Scoble with "5000 friends" are abusing the
service, and that when they combine that abuse with mass messaging, it's easy
to see why Facebook would react.

~~~
delackner
Exactly. Facebook is only useful for keeping in contact with your friends as
long as the connectivity graph of your friends actually only includes real
friends.

If a friend posts a status update, and a friend of that friend comments, you
see the comment. The likelihood you will see comments from some random person
you will never meet increases by the sum of fake friends of _all_ of your
friends.

Even if you have say, 100 real friends, but each of them has ~5 fake friends,
you are exposed to comments from 500 random strangers.

~~~
teej
You may be right, but I've never seen it happen. I have over 600 "friends",
many of which I've conversed with online, but none of whom have commented,
posted, or tagged me on -anything-. The exception being the people whom I've
met in person.

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jrnkntl
But but... this guy is a "social media expert" ...

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matthias
Possible fix: institute a "real" friend limit that is reasonably low. If a
user has reached the limit, subsequent requestees are automatically added to a
fan page. Allow the user to swap people between the two. Facebook's fan pages,
updates etc keep a good balance between marketing & spam... this would enforce
the use of them.

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turtle3
Am I the only person who thinks the author really missed a headline
opportunity by not using "iFart author thinks that Facebook policy stinks"?

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time_management
I use Facebook only because my friends are on it. I like the ease of access
Facebook provides to people I like, but this has more to do with it being the
most-used social site. Facebook itself sucks and I would do very gross things
to make a living before I would have Mark Zuckerberg as a boss.

~~~
unalone
Facebook isn't perfect, but it's not a sucky site. It's streamlined and
efficient, it runs _very_ quickly (especially compared to MySpace or Bebo or
Hi5), and it's got a surprisingly slim history of messing things up for
people. Yeah, it gets in trouble, but Facebook deals with hundreds of millions
of accounts, and it does a pretty damn good job at all of that. Compare to
MySpace, which has had incidents of murders, suicides, massive spam, site
breakages, _page_ breakages, and a week-long removal of "gay" statuses from
their websites, and Facebook's track record is incredible. They've got an
impressive team.

I've also written to a person who works at Facebook, and he says it's a pretty
good job with some brilliant co-workers.

I'd be willing to bet that Facebook reinstates this account, similar to the
way they reinstated Scoble's. And this is a way way edge case: most people
don't write to 900 not-friends. I'm sure Facebook's spam filter picked that
up, but I'm just as sure that in a week's time this account will be back and
running.

