Udated: 6/14 (added views on privacy changes, updated privacy settings)
Update: 5/13 (added analysis link, other links)
Update: 5/12

Many, many reasons for doing so. I’ll update this post later with a FAQ on why. This is going to be an extremely long post and will be updated quite frequently. I’ll probably make it sticky.

1) Why?
I want to control my own online identity, not leave it to a private company with questionable ethics that is accountable to very few. I also don’t have confidence in the technical/security aspects of the site. This has little to do with privacy and I’ll even post links to embarrassing photos.

2) Privacy is dead. Anyway, you have almost 200,000 Twitter followers.
Again, this has little to do with privacy. The ask-for-forgiveness later model of the Facebook system is too much for me. The only thing I care about on Facebook getting out is my email address. And we have already seen this info provided and exposed through two XSS attacks on Yelp.

I’m not going to pin this on Facebook, but the day I deactivated my account, I began to receive hundreds of spam messages a day. I think this has more to do with the poor security of the Yelp site.

3) But they upped your privacy capabilities and made them easier to control.
True, I can now hide my friends and my interests. This move does very little to actually prevent that information from being displayed (you are still listed as a member of the interest group and you are still listed from your more privacy-challenged friends). The simpler controls actually sound nice and I can blow away permissions for the 100+ apps in one fell swoop. Nice. I am contemplating creating a new, bare-bones account that will redirect people to my website. I will continue to hold out and see if there are any more slip-ups.

Bottom Line: Facebook does not respect its users.
Not just with privacy, they have a cavalier attitude that they are smarter than the average user (which is probably true given the Read Write Web spectacle). Here are a few examples:

1. Embedding originating IP addresses in emails.
2. Excessively changing privacy controls.
3. Opt-out schemes on many new features (see below analysis).
4. Tricking users into oversharing (see below analysis).
5. Using circular logic to back up the default-to-everyone.
6. Turning a blind eye to the social game offer schemes.
7. Extracting usurious fees from profitable partners (Zynga).
8. Claiming to be open by embracing and extending open source projects and protocols (see my Salmon post).

And I could go on for a while. I have seen the future and it scares me.

Read a great analysis of the recent facebook privacy changes.

When I first got onto Google Buzz, I quickly learned that it is far too easy to cross social Activity Streams. I have accounts on FriendFeed, Cliqset, and others, that aggregate your various social networks into a single activity stream. So this becomes a problem if you add cliqset and your twitter account to Buzz - content is duplicated. And with multiple streams, it can get much worse, fast.

Another problem with these streams is that sometimes they feed into each other to create a river of data. The problem here is finding a crossed stream within that river. Or pulling a single stream out when you don’t even know where it originated.

There has been much talk about the appropriately named Salmon Protocol which allows for comments on your activity to swim upstream to the originating source. This would effectively de-aggregate your content so that conversations can occur in their original silo. Much like permalinks are used when you blast your RSS feed all over the place. Though, this becomes much more important with activity.

Facebook’s Open Graph is pretty much an implementation of Salmon via widgets and toolbars. It’s surprising to me that people in the Salmon circles are calling for OpenLike and OpenDislike when those are just a subset of Salmon. If we could just integrate OAuth and Salmon, there is your viable, open-source competitive framework to Facebook.

To me, it just seems that Facebook is closely watching these Open protocols and pulling an Embrace and Extend on them. Nothing from the Open Graph is new or unique, but people are praising the “visionaries” at Facebook for making a play to take over the web. Wake up people, we’ve already had these tools in front of us for months.

I really expected Google to make this move with Buzz and am shocked that the rug was pulled out from under them. Their focus on the mobile space may be blinding them from the threat to their bread & butter, search.

image/salmon-protocol.org (you guys really need a new logo!)

Ok, first the robots have something new to say

Robots have shiny metal posteriors which should not be bitten.

Now, color me confused. I’m confused by the new Mozilla naming conventions (not about metal butts). I had always believed Lorentz was a methodology rather than a physical build. Not true. Mike Beltzner said this to CNet a while back:

Next on Mozilla’s agenda is an update to Firefox 3.6 code-named Lorentz, a release that embodies a new attempt to speed up the frequency of Firefox updates.

So Lorentz is actually a release that embodies this new methodology. Oh.

Lorentz is also the first step on the road to Electrolysis. There is also JaegerMonkey, which combines the best from Apple (SquirrelFish), Adobe (nanojit), and Mozilla (TraceMonkey). I guess V8 was left out of the party. Ars, as usual, has a good article on this. I do have a 64-bit build of Electrolysis (let me know if you want it).

So now we have Firefox 3.6.3 Lorentz, Firefox 3.6.3 JaegerMonkey, Firefox 3.7 Electrolysis, etc. It makes sense from a developers perspective to separate the projects like this, especially if you’re trying to add new features into minor updates, but I don’t think it has been explained well enough to the mainstream.

I don’t think my explanation is very good either. Is there a definitive document on this methodology?

You can download the Lorentz beta on the Downloads page.

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Update: This has nothing to do with Apple as this API was signaled for termination long ago.

Just had a hell of a time compiling Firefox 3.6.2 against the 10.6 SDK.

First, I forget to patch the sqlite3 bug (not sure why this is causing me problems as it was closed as fixed). Then after patching, a make clean didn’t get rid of enough cruft to let the build complete.

So starting from scratch and I get a new error I’ve never seen:

In file included from /Users/beetle/src/mozilla/toolkit/xre/nsSigHandlers.cpp:58:
/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/usr/include/ucontext.h:42:2: error: #error ucontext routines are deprecated, and require _XOPEN_SOURCE to be defined

And looking in /usr/include/ucontext.h, you see:

#else /* !_XOPEN_SOURCE */
#error ucontext routines are deprecated, and require _XOPEN_SOURCE to be defined
#endif /* _XOPEN_SOURCE */

This file has not been touched since Sep 30 of last year, so WTF. I usually do all my builds against 10.6, but someone asked me to do a 10.5 build so this issue JUST came up as of Firefox 3.6.2 (does not exist in 3.7, yet). Digging and diving a tad, I find that accelerometer controls are baked into 3.6.2 so this is probably what’s causing the problem.

Anyway, to fix this change the ucontext.h include to sys/ucontext.h like this (appears on lines 57-59 of toolkit/xre/nsSigHandlers.cpp):

#if defined(XP_MACOSX)
#include <ucontext.h>
#endif

to

#if defined(XP_MACOSX)
#include <sys/ucontext.h>
#endif

Things should be then be smashing, in the Austin Powers kind of way.

So who’s to blame? Mozilla takes the fall on this one, though this bug has already been fixed.

I’m on the bleeding edge here using not-publicly-available Apple dev tools (I’m in the Apple dev program, can’t say anything, NDA, sshhh).

I could make this a list of a hundred things, but these three are really getting to me:

1) Get Straight Your Bulk Rules
Sites like Twitter Karma do not allow you to bulk unfollow because it’s against your terms of service, but they are allowed to bulk block! What do you think people are going to do? A) Click on each person, use the pulldown menu, unfollow or B) Bulk block. This does not make sense.

2) State Your Following Rules
The explanation you give for why you “are not allowed to follow more people at this time” is absurd. There is a link to Follow Limits And Best Practices Page, but it’s busted. And anyway, the rules have changed again over the past week and I’m yet to pin it down. The 24hr/1,000/1.1 ratio follow limit is no longer valid. Why do we have to guess at these things?

3) Delete Accounts
If an account is deleted, umm, I probably don’t want to follow it. I also don’t want to see it following other people (check list followers for an example).

Which brings me to another point….

Most people don’t know how to use lists. I get put on these follow-back lists, people follow the list, then message me about why I didn’t follow them back. You’re doing it wrong!

I’ve been a long time fan of The Planet, the “Global IT Hosting Leader”, because they’ve always had outstanding service. They aren’t the cheapest out there, but in my experience they’re the most reliable.

Just one quick story, then I’ll get to the point. A couple years ago, a Sarasota news channel and paper were going to sit down with our startup and do an interview. The interview was scheduled for some time before I’m usually awake, no big deal, but on the day of, I get an escalation call from The Planet saying out main webserver is down. I immediately learn that our server had literally caught on fire and we were supposed to do this big interview where we planned to demo our website, IN HALF AN HOUR. To make this story short, the technicians were able to salvage our drives, swap chassis, and get new hardware back online within 15 minutes. We were able to demo our website just fine during the interview. It was an amazing coordination of effort that come together perfectly at the end.

Well, in setting up my next company, I looked to The Planet. By following their twitter stream, I found out about The Planet Sand Castle. In their words,

The first major hurdle for a software developer is finding the online space for new ideas to grow. The costs of rolling out and testing new software can be prohibitive, especially in uncertain economic times. The Planet is offering the developer community an economic stimulus of sorts to transform dreams into realities: The Planet Sand Castle.

I applied and within a week, I was in. I was initially given the mid level server, then at the last minute they bumped me up to the highest end server under the program (about a $500/mo. deal). Free! No strings attached! For a year!

The Planet also did something else pretty amazing under this program, they gave Rice University 50 servers for entrepreneurial research and development. Since I was one of the first into the program, I was asked for a quote for an article: Hosting Company Offers Free Servers to Developers.

I’m not a paid shill for The Planet, I actually purchased a year’s worth of service on my own dime for a different server days before all this happened (they wouldn’t even go beyond the lousy 6% yearly discount. I asked for a free t-shirt and I got a “lol” over the online support). I just think they offer superior services and I’m willing to pay for that.

I have never been paid for a tweet. I just wanted to get that out there right away.

This doesn’t mean I haven’t had offers of a hundred dollars for a single tweet. I’ve just always refused, believing that the higher moral ground is more important to me and I don’t want diminish any social currency I may have.

If this post sounds like gibberish, the back story is that I have over 150,000 followers on Twitter and the growth is only accelerating. With this many followers, I’m getting approached more and more often by people wanting to promote their products. In the past, I have agreed as long as:

• It’s not a scam
• It’s a product or app that I genuinely feel has some value

As already mentioned, I don’t take kickbacks and in most cases, I don’t even receive the product I’m giving away. I would rather see a happy follower, than use that product myself (if they were iPads, the story might be different, heh).

So you may have noticed that I’ve been running a few giveaways lately and will probably continue to do so. If these are annoying, don’t hesitate to let me know.

I really want to hear your opinion on this. Is it annoying? Should I continue? Should I eat a rock?

image/flickr

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Update: I started writing this post and realized I’m finding so much about the iPad on a daily basis, I’ll never finish this. I’m going make this sticky and continue to expand on it as I uncover new notions of what this thing is.

There seem to be two warring factions over the iPad, those that think it makes sense and those that don’t. I’m firmly in the “think it makes sense” group.

Flash
I hate Flash. I hate the AIR runtime. I don’t even have the browser plugin installed (my hatred extends beyond ClickToFlash). But most of the people that will buy this device will have some sort of affinity for it. I can just see my sister, buying this for use on the couch, firing it up and Farmville being a blue square. The lack of Flash matters most to those who don’t even know what it is.

This is the New Apple OS
Some fear that iPhone OS X, which will most likely be re-branded Mobile OS X, will creep upwards to laptops and desktops. Apple is not stupid, this will never happen. Do you think they haven’t noticed the huge developer community that lives and loves OS X? This is the community that create the applications and apps that make iP and Macs such a pleasure to use. Apple is not going to do anything to interfere with the love.

The iPad is for my Mom
Recently, my parents hashed it out over my mom’s desire for an Apple laptop. My dad was against it as he didn’t want to learn a new OS. She ended up with a Dell. The iPad would be perfect for her, no learning required. What we’re seeing here is the wii-ification of the game console. Bringing a somewhat arcane device to the masses. But my mom is going to be awfully pissed her genealogy software doesn’t work on it.

It’s Just a Big iPod Touch
And my iPhone is just a smaller, less powerful, less capable iPad. The only things that matter about the physical aspects are a) the size of the screen and b) it’s running Apple’s A4 chip (which I’ll get to later). Watching the Jobs announcement was boring, truly boring. I wasn’t there so I checked out the live blogs without the benefit of motion. It was the 7 minute iPad intro video that blew my mind. And the word on the street is that you “have to use it to understand it”. Watching the video was enough for me. It is the interface that allows this device to excel where everyone else has failed.

It Doesn’t have X, Y, or Z
I firmly believe that Apple has introduced what the market will bear, not what Apple is capable of. You can see evidence of this tactic with the camera in the iPod Nano and a lack of one in the iPod Touch. The iPod Touch can survive with its current specs, the Nano, not so much. I bet Apple is currently working on the 3rd or even 4th generation of the iPad right now. I also believe this product line will be pushed more aggressively, no once per year updates.

This is Not a “Hobby” Product
When we got the iPod Touch, it wasn’t called the iTouch. Same with Nano, Shuffle, and now Classic. The branding remains consistent - iP. The iPad fits into this branding mold, whereas a “Hobby” product does not - tv.

The Apple A4 CPU/GPU
I don’t have any knowledge that isn’t already out there, but I’m damn curious how many cores this thing has. Apple, with its PA Semi purchase, has brought us a screaming, power-sipping monster. We all know the next iPhone will be called the iPhone A4. I bet this is what has postponed the launch of the tablet for so long, Jobs just was not comfortable releasing an underpowered device that did not hold up well in battery life.

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Mashups. That name seems to grate on me now, never liked it. Several years ago, 2005 maybe, web apps or even web functions became much more liberal with sharing information. We saw the pioneers like Flickr and Delicious open up their data to 3rd parties through APIs. The seminal event was probably Google Maps. Closed to 3rd parties in the beginning but pried open, the map data was too enticing. Before there was an API for Google Maps, I was one of the few to mash data on top of it. This gave rise to the term Mashups.

Fast forward to today, where providing an API is no longer an option, but a necessity. If you don’t provide one, your competitor definitely will.

One of the most successful and open APIs is Twitter’s. Spawning tens of thousands of 3rd party apps, cementing Twitter’s lead in the micro-blogging sector. Nobody can come close to them.

In this post, I want to go over two examples. The first example is what got me onto this train of thought, more below.

Shelfari vs. Goodreads
I’ve been using both sites for over a year, but Goodreads is now, frankly, kicking Shelfari’s ass. Though I think Shelfari is a superior website - I’ve invested so much time into Shelfari and am somewhat miffed that it is destined for oblivion.

Why?

You can probably guess by now, they have no frikkin’ API! FriendFeed, Cliqset, Ping.fm, etc. cannot interface with Shelfari (and Shelfari doesn’t integrate with anything else) so none of your content ends up in your Activity Stream. People don’t see what you are doing on the site, people never learn it exists, people don’t use it.

Gowalla vs. Foursquare
This one is a bit less obvious, but the lack of an API in Gowalla is killing it. Their blog states, on January 13th, the API is nearly complete. NEARLY COMPLETE! What, are they waiting for it to be perfect before rolling it out? Bad idea. Do you think Twitter waited until their API was golden before letting others use it?

On the other hand, Foursquare has had their API out since at least May 27, 2009, this is when the first message was posted to the discussion group. They even have an app gallery!

Now for some objective data, (kind of). Since I cross link a lot of my social accounts, I get a lot of spillover from Twitter. When an social app really starts taking off, I start to get an increasing number of requests. Request numbers for these sites:

• Shelfari - ZERO. EVER.
• Goodreads - 1 to 2 per day.
• Gowalla - 2 to 4 per day.
• Foursquare - 10+ per day.

If you’re aggregating data or building a social site and don’t have an API, you’re history.

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