
YCRFS 7: Applications of Facebook Instant Personalization - pg
http://ycombinator.com/rfs7.html
======
mechanical_fish
Okay, before we go anywhere I need a couple of answers.

A. Is Instant Personalization ("InP") built on an open protocol?

In other words, if I build foo.example.com and it uses InP to access
Facebook's social graph, and later on I decide I also want to support Google's
social graph, will Google be able to serve that graph using the same InP
protocol? Or can I write a middleware service that grabs data with InP,
massages the data (e.g. "filter out only the friends who live in a particular
zip code") and reexports the data using the InP protocol?

Or will Facebook's lawyers be fighting such a move every step of the way?

B. Okay, we're playing in Facebook's world, the world where everyone has a
public social graph and everything in their profile is public, public, public.
Fine. But does this mean that, if I use Instant Personalization to grab a
user's extremely-public social graph, I'm allowed to use it as I would any
other public information that I stumbled across on the web? Can I, for
example, index it and search it? Or can I write a tool that populates a second
social network's database with a list of friends from Facebook?

Or will Facebook's InP terms of service require that I avoid doing that,
because what "public" really means is "everyone can look at it, but only if
they pay Facebook one cent every time they look and promise not to take any
pictures or remember anything?"

~~~
ahaugen
Hey there. I'm Austin Haugen a product manager on the Facebook platform team.

A/ Instant Personalization uses the same set of APIs as the rest of platform.
The only thing that changes with Instant Personalization, is that when you hit
FB to see if the user is connected to your application, we will return
'connected' for all logged in Facebook users, who haven't opted out.

B/ Instant Personalization follows the same data policies as data you would
get through a standard Facebook application. Details can be found here in
section III: <http://developers.facebook.com/policy/>

------
swedegeek
This is very frightening news. Even if I did want this feature at all (I
don't), I would still be extremely concerned that some site that I might wind
up on will capture any personally identifiable about me when I really don't
want them too.

Hopefully this link is lacking in some critical details in regards to seurity
and privacy. It's one thing if I put info into a particular site, but very not
cool if other sites can basically ask about me and get information back.

~~~
dzlobin
FWIW, it has been months since facebook's privacy settings made headlines. I
think anyone that cares should have and likely has adjusted their privacy
settings to keep unwanted information out. That, or taken the smarter path of
keeping things they don't want others to see off of facebook

~~~
_delirium
I'd consider myself pretty tech-savvy, and I'm _still_ unsure how exactly to
do that. The last I heard, I had to individually block each site that I didn't
want my data shared with, and the only three I've seen mentioned are Yelp,
Pandora, and Microsoft Docs. Is there some place I can monitor for new
additions? Or is there a way I can just say, "block all apps by default unless
I explicitly enable them?"

~~~
jogle
[http://www.facebook.com/#!/settings/?tab=privacy&section...](http://www.facebook.com/#!/settings/?tab=privacy&section=applications)

Click "Edit your settings" down at the bottom left.

Click "Edit your settings" on the "Instant Personalization" setting.

Uncheck the box on the next page.

~~~
_delirium
I've done that, but I was remembering some posts (e.g.
[http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/how-opt-out-
facebook-s-...](http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/how-opt-out-facebook-s-
instant-personalization)) that claimed that was insufficient. It seems it
depends on how much you want to block; even if you opt out of instant
personalization, the API will still let apps slurp some data through your
friends (though not data deemed private), _unless_ you've also explicitly
blocked that app. The main thing missing seems to be a way to block all apps
except a whitelisted set. You can blacklist apps, or you can opt out of apps
entirely (there's a setting to turn off app access completely), but you can't
block-by-default and then whitelist.

~~~
ahaugen
Hey there. I'm Austin Haugen, a product manager on the Facebook platform team.
If you opt out of Instant Personalization by following the steps above, you
will never receive an instantly personalized experience on these sites and we
also block the sites for you, so when your friends arrive your information
will not be accessible. This was a change we made in May based on user
feedback.

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pvg
It seems like the real challenge here is coming up with interesting and useful
applications of this that also don't feel like 'Instant Creepoutification'.
Weren't there Amazon badges/buttons on third party sites that included your
name, some years ago? They seem to have gone out of style, maybe due to their
inherent creepiness?

~~~
chrischen
It's only creepy if the personalization is tacked on and out of place. If
integration were done in a meaningful manner, for example if you were on a
site and you wished you could see the site in the context of your social
circle, then such integration probably wouldn't be creepy. It would done in
such a way where the integration is part of the core value offer.

But say I'm reading an article and it says "your mother likes this too," well
to me it doesn't add much to the site. So what's left is the creepy factor
naked and exposed. I guess that's why there's the RFS: so we can find more
useful integration of facebook. But as soon as it's useful no one will think
creepy. Creepy is the ugly girl who stares at you, but the pretty one who does
it isn't.

~~~
pvg
_It's only creepy if the personalization is tacked on and out of place._

I'm not sure it's just that. A big factor in the creepy feeling is the
unexpectedness. You don't, generally, expect most websites to know who you are
and what your social circle is. And if they are, unexpectedly, it feels
creepy. I understand that Facebook's idea is 'one day, it will be so common,
it won't be creepy'. They may well be right but it seems like a tremendously
high hurdle to overcome, to me.

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Tichy
Somehow I had been hoping that that kind of thing would become part of the
browsers, giving me more control over the kind of data to give away. Isn't
Mozilla working on something like that?

Still, of course everything has to live in the cloud, in case I switch my
computer. So I guess Facebook simply took that market...

I wonder what would be a good way to give people their own private cloud?
Perhaps CouchDB?

------
wolfrom
I'm wondering if Facebook will allow for an Instant Personalization partner to
ask the user to opt-in before accessing the data. I love the idea of making
things more fluid for those who want it, but I worry that this is the type of
service that will alienate as many as it will endear.

~~~
tomjen3
You could be right about that, you could also be wrong. Do an A/B test and you
will know.

------
eugenejen
Hi Paul,

My current company (thehotlist.com) has been working on what you asked in
these two paragraphs for two years.

"Facebook began by testing Instant Personalization with a handful of popular
existing sites. But the interesting question for us is: what new things could
be built using it that couldn't even have existed before? What new things
could you do if you already knew users and their friends the moment they
arrived?

One obvious advantage is that it will decrease the friction of trying
something new. That will make it easier to launch dramatically novel things.
The problem with dramatic innovations is that users often don't understand
what you've made till they try it. Now you'll just be able to show them."

Would you like to give me some feedback if you visited thehotlist.com?

And if anyone visits thehotlist.com and has questions to ask me about the
experience in using Facebook as main data source, feel free to ask me.

Eugene Jen

~~~
arnorhs
I'm not pg but I don't really understand this website. What does it do? I
signed in and saw a map of my location. Tried to change my location, but no
luck.

The name sounds like it's a list of something that's currently hot/cool or
something like that, but it seems like a check-in thing (according to the
interface)

Also, the font you are using in cufon doesn't have any foreign characters, so
my name is displayed as:

Arnr Heiar Sigursson

when in fact it is:

Arnór Heiðar Sigurðsson

~~~
eugenejen
Thanks Arnór. This is very useful feedback because you are outside our test
data point.

By the way, when you tried to change your location, did you try to type the
location into the text box? Can I know what did you type so I can test on my
end?

~~~
arnorhs
Yes, I did. I typed in "Mjoahlid 8, Reykjavik, Iceland", which works fine in
google maps (I saw you were using google maps).

when I type that into your box it gets converted into "Capital Region,
Iceland". Which is not very accurate :)

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callmeed
Since instant personalization is a pilot program and only open to select
sites, anyone applying with this RFS in mind really couldn't have a working
demo.

------
JarekS
We do a real-time communication and relationship management (CRM) software and
currently thinking of this RFS but would like to hear some feedback first.

First - our system lets businesses to invite their customers and prospects to
the joint workspace (target customers are B2B companies. Facebook-like system
- see screenshots here: [http://blog.smartupz.com/2010/08/summary-of-key-
elements-of-...](http://blog.smartupz.com/2010/08/summary-of-key-elements-of-
disqourse.html) ).

If the sales cycle is longer you have a lot of email chaos (both on sales team
end and customer team end) and we help those teams to avoid that, build
stronger relationship and maintain their own business social network. We also
automatically track sales cycle progress based on the communication that is
going on in the system.

And yes - we are using this right now and people prefer this to an email. It
really works (because every action you make in the system sends an email
notification it's not really such a huge workflow change).

Anyway - we see that Instant Personalization could improve shared customer
workspace a lot: \- customer could see "social proof" - who else in his social
network did business with that company? And instantly ask for the reference.
\- auto avatar and contact info \- Sales team could have instant info on what
current customer likes (i.e. food, hobby etc.). This is a bit creepy but could
speed up the sales cycle.

What do you think?

~~~
notahacker
Not many b2b social networks are based on Facebook social relationships...

~~~
MyBoxnRama
But there are humans working for b2b companies, no?

------
gdltec
The problem I see with this is that the application I create will be dependent
on Facebook's service, what if I want to use something else? what if my
application is so successful that Facebook decides to create a service/app
that does what mines does? This is the problem with building on top of
existing services such as Twitter, Facebook, etc... I see the benefits these
companies get by letting other developers test new "features", if they see
something having some success then they just implement it themselves...

------
chrischen
Does this RFS apply to any web application which integrates with Facebook in a
mutually beneficial way, or specifically with instant personalization on a
third party site (application's site)?

~~~
pg
This particular RFS is for the more specific case of using Instant
Personalization.

