Two Slashes

Chances are, if you’ve logged into Facebook anytime in the past two days or so, you were probably greeted by the following notification above your news feed informing you of Facebook’s switch to usernames.  (Of course, it was also probably readable , but I like trying not to overrun the sidebar.)  For a service that has long required you to refer to yourself by number, almost as if you were helpfully and willfully subjecting yourself to a prison sentence (and there are reasons for me selecting this metaphor in particular, but they’re outside the scope of this post), the ability to individually identify yourself on your own terms is quite a jump.

Despite this huge change for Facebook, though, I think I’ve still seen more posts about Twitter (alright, I get it, it’s the hot new thing thanks to Oprah, but there’s only so many times I can read about a new startup *cough*Spymaster*cough* without looking for the nearest stabbing implement to use on myself) show up in Google Reader or on Digg or Reddit.  So, what’s the big deal?

I suppose you could think of this in terms of license plates.  You could go with whatever random assortment of letters and numbers your state assigns you when you register your car, and play along regardless of if you get W376JSB or 3826273, or you could jump through whatever hoops are required and get a plate that has your name, IRC nickname, or favorite type of cheese on it.  This is Facebook’s equivalent to giving you vanity plates for that Camaro of yours.  You know, unless prison numbers are your thing.

Of course, all cool news has to come with some strings attached, and Facebook is of course not one of those extremely rare exceptions.  However, according to the Facebook Blog, they’re rather tame things like that you can only use the “Romanized alphabet” (I think someone meant to say “Latin” here, and it’s not me), numbers, and periods.  (There’s the obvious technical issue of using things like question marks, hash marks, and ampersands in a URL here to blame.)  That shouldn’t be a big deal, though.  It’s not like you can put an interrobang on your license plate, though Facebook also warns that they’re looking into extended character support.  Of course, once you claim a name, you can’t change it (which is not the case over at Twitter, though MySpace still wrote your name in permanent marker the last time I was there), so there’s no gaming the system to reserve “CutiePie” for your girlfriend…you know, unless YOU want to be referred to as “CutiePie” (and who wouldn’t?).

Once you reserve that name, you get the awesome perk of being able to use facebook.com/yourusernamehere to refer new friends directly to your profile instead of making them search for you, dig through all the people with similar names to find the one with the right network and picture (if you have a reasonably useful picture, that is), and worry for three days about whether they attempted to befriend the right person or not.

Being the technical weenie I am, the rules Facebook imposed also gave me a slew of ideas of how Facebook could improve this system.  I put my head together with Nick Schwab, and we came up with the following in less than a minute:

• Since those “Romanized” characters are more or less the only legal characters in a domain name (excepting the hyphen), it would be easy for Facebook to give users a subdomain rather than append their name to the end.  In an ideal circumstance, both methods would work the same way, but it might provide for more “ownership” of that username and profile if a subdomain were used instead.  (If you’re not following me, think yourusername.facebook.com as opposed to that example above.)
• Facebook could use these unique URLs (either the method I’ve suggested using subdomains or Facebook’s original implementation) to support OpenID, an identification technology that you might have heard of considering its extensive use here on this blog.  Considering Facebook seems to want a piece of the identity market (Facebook Connect, anyone?), allowing users to use this would be a feature I suggest they implement.
• Again, excepting hypens, the character range covers everything usable in an e-mail address.
  • Perhaps Facebook will allow users to send e-mail to username@facebook.com, which would be a great way to get in touch with people without them having to make their e-mail address public.  Admittedly, this kind of detracts from the use of Facebook’s built-in messaging.
  • If Facebook went after the subdomain system I outlined above, they would be in a great position to provide an e-mail-based interface to the site, something that would make Facebook accessible from an even wider range of devices and platforms.  Perhaps sending a note to wall@username.facebook.com would allow you to post on someone’s wall remotely, while message@ would provide the same functionality as sending a private message.  Want to post some photos?  Attach them to a note and fire it off to photos@, where they’ll immediately be added to an album titled by your subject line.

Some people aren’t as happy about the change, though.  I vaguely recall one person (I don’t recollect where I saw it or who said it, so if it was you, speak up in the comments) comparing Facebook to MySpace in this respect, saying that the former is moving towards the latter in terms of usability and obnoxious features, and another person suggesting that this is just the next step in Facebook’s transition to “become” Twitter.

Of course, I could be the world’s biggest idiot for getting excited over this (to the point where it’s managed to be added to my Google Calendar), but I’ll gladly be one of the first people to claim their name.  So, what do you think?  Are you going to be eagerly waiting for a chance to prove how much of a “Cool.Kid.123″ you are, or would you like those prisoner numbers tattooed onto your neck?

If it’s easy to pull the wool over your eyes, Wednesday was probably not your day.  If you’re Kathleen Danielson, for example, you avoided any links lest they end up Rickrolls.  I feel that April Fool’s Day is a pretty amusing (and dangerous) time to be an Internet…well, addict, I guess, and it’s a day I particularly enjoy.  (The danger is only compounded if you were spending your day in the fetal position worrying about Conficker, but I’ll get to that in a second.)

Compared to recent years, I think that this year’s bag of tricks was relatively tame.  DeviantArt (at least, as far as I know) wasn’t propogating 4chan memes (mudkips, anyone?) and the most YouTube did was flip videos upside-down.  Sure, ThinkGeek had bacon paste (but who doesn’t love bacon), and it sounds just believable enough that it might end up like their 8-bit tie from April Fools’ past.

I thought this picture only added credibility to my April Fool's joke, even though it was only by coincidence that Rose happened to tag me right after my status change. Apparently I was the only one to think so.

I myself decided to participate, though I didn’t really come up with my pranks until five minutes before midnight.  For starters, I was uncreative enough to be one of the dozens of people changing their relationship status on Facebook.  And, in a stroke of luck, a friend soon tagged me in a photo that made my status change almost believable.  Alas, I didn’t hear anything from my friends when I changed my status to claim that I was in a relationship, but a few friends started an uproar on the return trip.

The other trick started off on a new site of mine.  At the recommendation of Rachelskirts, I purchased the domain ShouldIUseComicSans.com to match a similar offering (thanks, @EricVictorino) only a few hours before, then decided that it changing what it said would be an excellent joke (but for one day only).  People fell for it, too.

I’m trying to come up with even better pranks for next year, though I’m coming up short.  I suppose it doesn’t really matter, as I have 363 more days to dwell on it.  (Suggestions are most welcome, though it might do better to e-mail them so there isn’t a public record to ruin the surprise.)

The corporate giants with the practical jokes weren’t the only people headlining on April 1, though.  Conficker, the latest worldwide scare, managed to slip through the day with very little fanfare.  Of course, there were isolated incidents, like my college campus blaming an outage on the worm, but on the whole I didn’t see too many news articles regarding the blasted thing.  Some people seem to think that this is exactly how it should be, though (and I agree).  However, you can’t deny that the Internet is still wholly intact.  (After all, you’re able to read this post, right?)

And, on a completely unrelated note, I decided to mess around with my dust-collecting Tumblr account.  There’s more information about that posted on the blasted thing, though, so I’ll let you visit if you’re interested in the matter.  (Hey, it could use the traffic anyway.)

Oh, and one more thing:  I’m in a relationship…alright, I don’t think you believed that for a second.  I don’t blame you, though.

Yesterday, I was messing around with Facebook and ended up stumbling into what I thought was a bit of a privacy leak.  I wrote it up, and it’s now available on the Writeups page or at this link.

I’m still doing some small edits to the article, but I wanted to make sure I got this notification post out before midnight so people would take it at least mildly seriously.  (Tomorrow’s April Fool’s Day, remember?)

Read it, pass it along, try it for yourself…ignore it.  It really doesn’t matter.  I just thought there might be a few people who wanted to know.

Feel free to leave feedback about it in the comments, including any suggestions you have on how to improve the content.

Excuses, excuses.  I was in the middle of writing this post when I was commissioned to sit on the phone keeping people awake on their train ride home, causing me to seek refuge in silence away from a computer.

With a little nudging from Nick S., who’s busy at work on The Next Big Thing™, I ended up keeping tabs on the press conference (call) Facebook held earlier today regarding their ever-changing service agreement.  If anything, it gave me a better idea of just how generally clueless some of the people running the scenes (and even some who are not) are.  Of course, this all comes after a giant uproar over Facebook changing their terms of service such that it read that Facebook now owned any user-submitted content.  Permanently.

While I don’t have a personal issue with Facebook utilizing the content I have uploaded to the service (namely, the same image of myself you can find on this site or any other service I use), I have several friends with interesting and original content who might be offed by just how many rights the social networking site was granting itself with the new policy (in theory).  I know that they wouldn’t like having their content ripped off, and I’m sure most of the people reading this would have similar issues.

I find it funny that people are willing to put up with all of these antics, though.  I guess I shouldn’t be all that surprised given that people deal with the Fail Whale, tolerated MySpace’s surefire “Oops, we had an error!” pages, and can generally use the Internet without the requirement of a computing license, but it still amazes me that people can be so blatantly ignorant when it comes to the things they share with other people and the methodologies they employ in doing so.  It’s because of stunts like these (alright, that’s the number two reason behind the fact that the services are designed that for reason) that I post pictures to Picasa, videos to Vimeo, and generally harbor my content all over at sites that put the creator’s rights before their own.  Besides, it’s not a wise idea to put all your eggs in one basket.

Facebook seems to be trying to take  recent events into consideration, as their latest blog post states that they’re going to try a more democratic system for some of the policy changes they enact across the site, in particular anything that might cause controversy.  Nick and I both came to the immediate conclusion that this may not be the best policy, as you’re asking the same people who have no common sense to vote one way or another.  It’s like giving a six-year-old a Presidential ballot (the fact that this is unlikely notwithstanding) – they’re ill-informed and incapable of making a sensical decision based on knowledge or reasoning, so their vote could more or less be attributed to pseudo-randomness.  Unfortunately, it’s a first-hand chance to fight for proper rights provided by few other platforms.

Like I said already, the conference didn’t exactly show a stroke of genius among either the reporters asking questions or the people in charge over at Facebook.  As an excellent example (and to end the post), I leave you with this short, unrelated question and the nonsensical answer provided straight from Facebook’s founder.  What a bright bunch.

Stacy Kramer (Paid Content): How important is this financially?
Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook): This is all about trusting our users. And it will result in the best outcome: the best community.

I came across a discussion on 20SB today regarding Michael Phelps and his little ‘drug incident’, the latest controversy to hit the media…right before whatever major controversy came right before it .  (I forget, as that’s what people tend to do.  They forget the previous misdeed as soon as something more recent gets brought to the forefront of their attention, even though the misdeed in question will still have lasting consequences.)

To be honest, I’ve always wondered why people take a particular interest in the private dealings performed by the rest of the world.  With any media format you care to name, chances are it’s been used to delve into the personal lives of countless famed actors and sports figures.  Blogs, television shows…essentially, you name it, it’s been used to tap into things that have no reason to be public.

People wonder why their friends tend to be photophobic and don’t want their pictures posted everywhere.  When you have incidents like this, it’s not a stretch to wonder why.  It can make or break relationships, turn relationships one way or the other, or, in some cases, completely screw up the rest of your life.  It all depends on who finds your dirty laundry and how evil they are with it, with a direct correlation to the amount of fame you’ve garnered throughout your life.  And it’s all stuff that people wouldn’t find out about otherwise, too.

In our quest for information and with the growth of media, we’ve evolved from caring about relevant and timely information to as much trivial tripe as we can stuff into our primitive brains, personal business being just one of the many categories people file away on a daily basis, with the only benefit being the increased average skill at pop culture games like Trivial Pursuit.  And whether that can even be classified as a skill is a debatable topic at best.

I find it rather pathetic that we’ve changed how we define our lives from what we do to what we do without getting caught, too.  Alas, that is a rant for another time.

I never thought I would be adding a marijuana tag, despite the fact that I’m not a druggie.  Go figure.

And yes, this post was almost two hours late, and it’s shorter than normal.  I have a legitimate excuse, though.

I can think of two reasons (not twenty-five) off the top of my head with which I can explain my jump back into social networking with Facebook last year.  The first was because of its relevance to my education (I can explain more some other time…), but the other (and perhaps more relative) reason was because social networking for me was ruined with all of those crappy surveys and “pass-this-forward” chain-mail notes typically associated with MySpace.

I think I’m going to have to find a new hidey-hole soon, though, because I think the MySpace “spam” has jumped ship in a big way.

Nick and I were making fun of the most recent hit on Facebook (in which the user posts 25 interesting things about themselves and then has everyone they know do the same in a chain) and ended up compiling a list of twenty-five (how original, eh?) reasons you know the site has dug itself a place in the mainstream community.  We came up with the following:

1. MySpace pleasantries, like the “if-you-get-it-you-must-post-it” ideology have found their way into the most useless of posts on Facebook.
2. Companies would rather pay someone to maintain a Facebook “page” than put together a full-on website.
3. (also known as 2b) Companies see more value in short-lived Facebook marketing gimmicks than they do in other longer-term investments.
4. Every entity known to man needs both a fan page and at least three different groups praising said entity’s hair and eye color and their date-ability.
5. (also known as 4b) In a work-safe allusion to xkcd’s Rule 34, if a Facebook group doesn’t exist for something you’re looking for, it must be created.
6. People you’ve never met before, let alone live in the same state as, ask to be your friend.  (I don’t know how many people claim they “recognize my name” in their friend request.  Sorry, but I’ve never bothered to keep in touch with any 40-year-olds from New Jersey, let alone ever been there.)
7. Advertisements are aware of your relationship status, and prey on you with this information.
8. The quickest and most effective way to recover your phonebook is by inviting all of your friends to post their numbers publicly to a Facebook group.
9. You get constant e-mail notifications that you’ve been invited to these groups.  (Of course, if you haven’t turned them off by now.)
10. You either ignore or accept these requests en masse in numbers too big to comprehend.  (To the order of a googol per day?)
11. Other websites try to use the Facebook design in hopes that it will make them “attractive.”  Sorry, but I don’t think that works.
12. Relationships are done and undone by the profile pages of those involved.
13. You find that people need to question what “it’s complicated” really means.
14. The act of poking someone is not a casual occurrence or a means to test the water, but the start of the next world war.
15. Not only are your friends on Facebook, but so are your parents, professors, and politicians.  (Alliteration++.)
16. It may now be optional, but everyone still writes their statuses (on Facebook or anywhere else) as though that extra “is” will be automatically added on, regardless of whether the blurb makes sense with or without it.
17. You’re more likely to be fired for partying on the weekend on your personal time than you are for making mistakes at work.
18. You’re more likely to lose all that effort you put into your education with your profile than you are in several other manners.
19. You find that your new pastime is untagging yourself from embarrassing photographs in hopes that your employer and/or other friends don’t see what you’ve been up to.  (It’s sad that people would rather play a cat-and-mouse game than simply not act like idiots for a camera.)
20. You find yourself being served legal papers via Facebook simply because the authorities haven’t had too much luck in tracking you down.
21. People make lists parodying common Facebook “note spam” in a poor effort to point out that things are going down the drain.
22. People no longer find proper instant messaging channels, e-mail, or even the phone appropriate ways to communicate.  The only forms of communication they now accept all revolve around their Facebook inbox or wall.  (If you don’t believe me, I have IM logs to prove that I’m not the only person who’s noticed this.)
23. You hear that Facebook is increasingly fitting into the shoes of Google and Microsoft and attempting to buy up everything in sight.
24. You hear that Facebook is increasingly interested in lending their userbase to third parties for data collection.
25. People randomly wish you a happy birthday, even though you’ve never told them when it was, and without any expectation of you doing the same thing on their special day.  (There’s nothing like a guilt-inducing sidebar area for that.)

Perhaps I’m being a little obnoxious in posting something like this, but I’m finding it harder to care as the number of posts I’m being notified about increases.  Twenty-five random facts about me?  Try twenty-five reasons Facebook is turning into MySpace with a new name.

Congratulations to anyone who followed that link from my Facebook status.  You’re a shining example of a person who randomly and trustingly clicks links from friends without considering whether they’re spam or not.  Either that, or you already recognize that domain…that section of the post at the bottom is especially for you.

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t be posting about my experiments here, as they’re not at all related to the topics I regularly discuss.  However, together with a little help from a friend or two, I’ve tried to poke and pry at people’s online habits with my past few tests.  What did I find?

The Birthday

Ah yes, my birthday was last week.  (Any and all birthday comments will be deleted and/or edited.)  Of course, only a few people even bothered to remember or acknowledge it (alright, so perhaps even the majority of my family didn’t care, but that’s beside the point).  For this experiment, I spent the two months prior scrubbing almost every reference to my age or birthday I could find from the Internet, well ahead of any search engine bots that may want to cache it as my birthday drew nearer.  The test?  To see whether people really rely that much on notifications from web forums or social networking sites to keep track of trivial facts like birthdays.

Granted, a birthday is nothing to be excited about, and in its own right might be considered useless or trivial information, depending on how well you know the person (and it’s more or less useless in an online perspective, but I digress).  And just to make things interesting, even after all of the information I removed (and now need to remember to re-add), I decided that I would cough up a few subtle hints.  (Alright, maybe my definition of ’subtle’ is skewed, but I’m not going to argue that point here.)  Net results:  A single congratulatory tweet (and what probably would have amounted to a second had I qualified a number in one of my tweets), one response via Skype after making it almost painfully obvious (you know who you are), and absolutely no response from any of 269 Facebook users friended with me (which is, admittedly, just a little pathetic).  All in all, a quiet great birthday by my standards. (I don’t want the attention, so perhaps my motives were a little flawed…)

Now that I’ve confused you enough, let’s try to take all of that and try and sum it up into something simpler:  Apparently people find Facebook (and other social networking sites) suitable replacements for a calendar.  Admittedly, there might be some benefit in having your friends make sure THEIR birthday is correct rather than have you transcribe it into your agenda a week early, but ultimately anyone who could and/or should have remembered (by my expectations) failed.

The Bait

With my birthday said and done, a friend of mine suggested that we play with some heads on Facebook by intentionally leading people to think that my birthday was a day later than it actually was by coughing up the appropriate status messages and wall posts.  Again, not a single person took the bait and left anything resembling a birthday greeting.

The thing to note about this, though, is that the friend I worked on this with only shares a portion of my friends mutually, and so comparatively there’s a much smaller pool of people to attempt to draw from.

Facebook Link Check

As you might have surmised from the leading line of this post, I decided to try one more test with Facebook simply to see if anyone was paying attention.  The action was simple:  click a link to visit this website.  No URL shrinking, mentions of rewards, or anything – just a link to Two Slashes.  And even though it’s been about an hour and a half since I posted that link, people have clicked it at least a few times, including while they were in the middle of searching through other peoples’ photo albums (actually, there are two referral links already).

Since this experiment is more or less still in progress, I’ll come back to edit this post if anything interesting or unusual comes out of it, but I don’t think there’s going to be anything all that exciting to discuss.

On the other hand, though, this eagerness for people to visit my site without too many hints that I even control it demonstrates once again that people are blind to what could happen should one of their friends get phished and start sending out some spammy URLs.  Not just on Facebook, but anywhere in general.

Conclusions

All of this makes me think of a single line from Men In Black:

Kay: A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you’ll know tomorrow.

Well, from my experiences, I’d be willing to go so far as to say a single person is just as intelligent as the collective (and that’s stupid).  And that’s especially amusing to me following this short on why the Internet is making people more cognizant.