Facebook

Well, according to the commercial above it is. But I tend to disagree. Sure there is a lot of stupid people there. And probably they’re the target of this platform as they’re spending the most of time on it. But common. Some individuals, including myself, are using it to simply stay in touch with friends and distant family, especially if you’re living abroad. And not everybody is addicted. I can live without Facebook for whatever period. But it’s nice source of entertainment and news about people I care about. However such commercials are lowering it to the level of dumb party-goers, hipsters and half-brains who cannot find any other activity for themselves than constantly reading about other peoples’ lives.

Today I’ve received email from Mozilla that they’ve taken down my add-on. They did that by request from Facebook as trademark infringe claim, because my add-on had Facebook in its name. As to not let the same happen to my text hosting service I’ve changed its name to Text Hoster. I hope that it would be enough as linking to Facebook is really an option for my service, not the main feature.

Have you recently noticed that you see less messages on your Facebook wall? It’s because of new filtering which is showing you the post only from people and pages which you’ve interacted most. Rest is filtered out. It could be nice, but actually Facebook rolled it out without any special notification, so I didn’t know about it. Was feeling a little lonely;( Good news is that you can easily turn it off. You need just to navigate to Facebook page, scroll to the bottom and click “Edit Options”. Now select “All of your friends and pages” and click “Save”. That’s it.

Today I’ve read about new bot, HoneyBot. It’s bot designed to use on IRC and Facebook chat. The way how it operates is both simple and clever. It enters the chat and starts chatting with two people (preferably with different sexes, it uses nickname analysis to distinguish it), then it passes text from one human to another, so there is no way that they would notice a bot, because they’re indeed talking with human being. Now bot is waiting for the link to be sent by one of parts and then changes it to its own directing to malicious page. Smart. So listen to your mother and don’t talk with strangers:)

Some time ago I’ve wanted to post excerpt from the book I was reading on Safari Books Online on my Facebook wall. Everyone who have ever used Safari knew that their books are displayed in special way, so you can only use their applet to copy text (probably they’ve done that to avoid people copying entire books). As a result you’ll obtain text which would reside in your clipboard. To publish it on Facebook you need just to paste it into appropriate field and…

Yes, Facebook limits text to be posted to 420 characters, so if you want to post something longer you need to find other way. And that’s how Text Hoster was born. It’s web application written by me to host text which can then be posted to Facebook. When you’ll go to fb.liox.eu you’ll find a field to enter your text and Send button, I believe it’s self explanatory. When you’ll click Send simple check is done to calculate length of your string, so if it’s less than 420 characters then it would not be hosted as there is no reason for it. Then you’ll see a page with your text, full link to your text, bit.ly shortened link and Facebook share button. After clicking Share you’ll be navigated to page as the one below.

It’s typical representation of Facebook generated link, as you can see there is shortened version of the text and bit.ly link, you can also add short description to it. Now click share again and voila your text is on your Facebook wall (of course you should be logged before sharing or you’ll be asked to log in), when somebody would click on it he would be navigated to hoster page and able to read full text.

From the article on TechCrunch I’ve learned about new book “The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World” by David Kirckpatrick. They’ve posted two excerpts there and in one of them you can read:
“In the first week of his sophomore year at Harvard, Mark Zuckerberg cobbled together an internet software program he called Course Match. The idea was to help students pick classes based on who else was taking them. If a cute girl sat next to you in Topology, you could look up next semester’s Differential Geometry course to see if she had enrolled in that as well. Hundreds of students immediately started using it.”

Today is the great moment in history of this blog. I’ve added Facebook’s Like button (). Yes ladies and gentlemen from now on you can easily show which of my posts you like:P

I must add that this button is here thanks to article of Mr. Ruhani Rabin.

UPDATE: There is simpler way to have Like button on WordPress blog. You can use Simple Facebook Connect plug-in, I’ve added it and it works great, plus it has other functions not only Like button.

I’ve been invited to test threadsy.com which is some kind of aggregation site which combines your mail, Facebook and Twitter (and more) accounts into one data stream. After some troubles with creating my account (it’s still in testing phase, so it can happen) I’ve added my Gmail, Twitter and Facebook accounts into it and begin to play. It’s pretty impressive. Everything is divided into two streams. One on the left called “inbound” consist every message which is posted directly to you. Left stream, called “unbound” is everything posted by your friends which is not addressed directly to you. You can post comments to Facebook posts directly from the stream, you can “like” them as well. You can post your post from it either and it’s possible to post both to FB and twitter simultaneously. It saves some time. But two things are pretty awesome:

TechCrunch posted text about how Facebook is trying to help unpopular people by asking their friends to post more often on their walls, read more here. It reminded me that when I was 10 years old (more or less) I’ve had neighbors with exactly the same kid as described in article. He was a year younger than me and really nice guy, but not very popular. Even kids in the same age as he was preferred to play with me than with him. His mother was so desperate that she once come to me and my pal when we were playing, and dragged him by force to her apartment to play with her son. Yeah, I was shocked. My mate “escaped” after few minutes. Next day father of my neighbor approached me with very serious look in his eyes and told me that I’m stealing his son’s friends and that he doesn’t like it. I was really frightened (10 years old), but fortunately my other buddy was there with me, so it ended just with that. Anyway, as you probably suspecting, it doesn’t end up well to the kido. He became even more unpopular. So as TechCrunch already suggested, if you’re parent of not very “cool” kid, don’t try to make “artificial” friendships for him, it would end up even worst.