Tumblr Mangles Developer Relations
Last week I logged on to Tumblr and was confronted with this abomination:
Missing e notice from tumblr. Way to encourage API development, guys.
Needless to say, this is pretty disturbing, and I wonder what Tumblr is thinking by posting this.
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The 2010 Social Networking Map (via tor.com, with OP credit to xkcd)
Check out this awesome thing (click for larger in new):
Continue reading: The 2010 Social Networking Map (via tor.com, with OP credit to xkcd) »
Killing Tynt’s “Read More” Clipboard Copy Hijacker With The Adblock Plus Plug-In For Firefox
Tynt's annoying Read More clipboard jacking: You can kill it with AdBlock Plus for Firefox.
I love Firefox. It’s pretty much the only Web browser I use.
I hate Tynt. If you’ve ever copied text from a Web page, then pasted it, only to find a mysterious “Read More:” link inserted at the end of the text you copied, you just ran headfirst into Tynt.
Each time a user pastes content from your website into an email, blog or website, we automatically add a URL link back to your site’s original content. When someone clicks that URL, they are directed back to your site and see the original content. This drives incremental traffic to your site when your content is shared without your knowledge while maintaining a consistent user experience.
It may well be a “consistent user experience” for me to have to hit the backspace key to delete the “Read more” link Tynt adds every time I copy a small block of text, but it’s a consistently annoying experience.
I appreciate the importance of reciprocal links. I understand the challenge to content publishers of having content lifted from their Web sites without attribution.
So before I get into details about this fix, let me be clear: If you copy Web content, attribute it. It’s the right thing to do.
That said, there’s a wrong way of getting people to do the right thing, and Tynt is definitely the wrong way.
I find having my simple act of extracting a quote from a Web page turned into a link-spamming takeover of my local machine to be far more disturbing than a tracking cookie or layer ad.
Don’t be messing with my clipboard. It’s mine, not yours. I will put into it what I want there, not what you want.
Fortunately, I was able to put an immediate end to Tynt’s “Read More” clipboard copy highjacking in Firefox with Adblock Plus, a highly popular add-in that does what its name suggests: Blocks advertisements, and other content, from displaying on a page.
The Answers I Wish Facebook Had Given To User Questions
The New York Times’ Bits blog has a post today in which chief Facebook lobbyist Elliot Schrage answers reader questions.
For a lawyer — especially a lawyer facing a Bonfire of the Vanities-worthy media frenzy, a meddling Congress, watchdog groups barking at his door and an inchoate Intifada by his longest-standing and most important partner — Schrage was pretty forthcoming; most lobbyist / marketers would equivocate their way out of a similar mess.
Actually, if you read the Times blog post closely enough, Schrage effectively admits it’s that sort of behavior that has put Facebook in hot water:
“Our desire to innovate and create new opportunities for people to share sometimes conflicts with our goal to create an easy and accessible user experience,” he wrote in the introduction. “It takes forums like this to get better ideas and insights about your needs.”
Which is the purpose behind this post. I’d like to put, in layman’s terms, Schrage’s answers to each of the questions posed, and either provide the answer I wish he had given — that is, an answer that is the plain truth about why Facebook does what it does — or expand on what he said.
Q: “Why can’t you leave well enough alone? Why do I have to do a weekly ritual of checking to see what new holes you’ve slashed into the Facebook Security Blanket, so that I have to go and hide or delete yet more stuff? Are Facebook customers really pounding on your door screaming that they want more categories of their personal data to be available to marketers every few months?”
Schrage: We are clearly upsetting people by making changes as often as we do. No personally identifiable information is shared with advertisers.
Me: Social media is young. What works and what is profitable changes quickly; what fit into the way Facebook did things, even just a few months ago, may be cutting off opportunities to make money or head off challenges from other social media providers today. That’s why things change so much: To protect and grow Facebook’s market share.
If you’re going to complain about Web advertising based on browsing habits, you probably should have stopped using the Web back in 1996. And if you’ve ever used a coupon, promo code, frequent buyer card or gift card, I’d like to kick you in the butt as I explain what, exactly, constitutes behavior-based marketing.
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On Facebook’s New Features, Privacy And The Near Future Of The Web
Quite a bit has been made recently of the changes to Facebook’s default settings, an extensive expansion of how Facebook shares data with other Web sites, and how all that works within the traditional expectation — if not the fundamental understanding — most people have about privacy.
Facebook’s recent change to, by default, share public user information with partner Web sites — namely, Microsoft’s Docs.com, Internet radio provider Pandora and city-based business review site Yelp — is “building a largely closed, alternative version of the Internet,” or, in plainer language, “a power grab.”
This argument is further (and ironically) strengthened by Facebook’s announcement at the recent f8 developer conference that it is switching from its proprietary Facebook Connect login system to OAuth, the soon-to-be-a-standard, open Web site authentication protocol. In so doing, the fabled idea of the “single sign-on” for all Web sites becomes less pipe dream and more within reach — with Facebook the linchpin, and by inference, the one link that can’t be removed from the chain.
In other words, Facebook is a 1998-vintage AOL that doesn’t suck.
That’s not a bad thing. Actually, it’s a great thing.
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