Subscribe to RSS
Archive for the ‘facebook’ Category:
Tweefight – the next way to throw shoes
It’s gone way beyond snowballs and shoes. Not only are there at least three separate “shoe throwing” applications on Facebook, now you can throw just about anything at your friends, from watermelons to sheep.
That’s fine. It’s not my cup of tea, but I know a lot of people enjoy such things. But, thankfully, Facebook lets me block these applications to prevent flooding my Facebook newsfeed stream with messages from these apps, like: “Bob threw a show at you. Throw one back!”
Yesterday, I got the following in my Twitter stream:
I just won a fight against @mrblog on Tweefight. I won! Do you want to fight? Try now http://tweefight.com/?opp=filos
It turns out Tweefight is a new service/game launched by buddy Luca Filigheddu. Clearly, a lot of people love this kind of thing. As noted above, I’m not one of those people.
When someone fights you on Tweefight, a “tweet” link is generated that posts a tweet of the type shown above. I have scripts in place that send all @mrblog references to my cell phone. The last thing I want to see in that stream is a “so and so threw a shoe at you” message. Unfortunately, Twitter doesn’t have a mechanism to block such tweets.
So I asked Luca if he could add an “opt-out” option to the Tweefight site, so if someone engages me in a “battle” on there, instead of getting a “tweet” link, they will see a notice that I’m not interested in receiving such messages. He agreed to implement an opt-out, which I think sets an excellent precedent for all future such “entertainment” applications. Since twitter doesn’t have the equivalent of “block this application”, such sites are going to have to police themselves.
Apparently the site is getting a lot of usage (so much so it was off-line much of the day yesterday) so it’s nice that Luca is so receptive to suggestions. It looks like Tweefight will do just fine without me – which is terrific – to each his own. 
PicDoodle virus shows Facebook’s true colors
Facebook continues to claim that they respect users’ privacy and discourage bad behavior in third-party applications.
Well, that must depend on how much they’re paid, or who you know, or some other random factors, because the PicDoodle app exhibits all the worst behaviors of an evil, evil virus, and yet Facebook continues to serve it up to users and defend the application.
The lame Silicon Alley Insider (which I refuse to link to here – look it up if you really need to see their awful reporting) attributes the following quote to Facebook:
“The PicDoodle application was tagging the maximum allotment of a user’s friend in each saved photo… This ran counter to user expectations…”
That statement is just infuriating. It is far beyond misleading and suggests that there’s a lot more to this story. There’s got to be something going on behind the scenes at Facebook for them to spew such total BS.
If PicDoodle messed around with tagging people (that I didn’t tag) in a “saved photo” that would be bad enough. But what it actually does isn’t even on the same planet. When one “Allows” (installs) the app, before they take any action at all, PicDoodle does it’s dirty work, all in the background. PicDoodle creates a Photo album and sticks a fake blank “photo” in it. It then tags people (your friends) who are not in that “blank” photo as being in that photo.
This causes all your friends to receive notifications from the Photos app (not from PicDoodle) saying they were tagged in a photo by you. When they click to see what photo you tagged them in, instead of viewing a photo, they see a link to the PicDoodle app that suggests they need to click it to continue. Since there is nothing else to see besides that link (because the actual photo is “blank”), the user clicks the link, hoping to finally see the photo that you tagged them in.
They get the usual “Allow” prompt to install the PicDoodle app, and still wanting to finally see the photo in which they appear, they click it. And viola, the process starts all over again for that user. And of course they never get to the “Photo” containing them – because there isn’t one.
How Facebook can declare this is just a “glitch” is beyond me. PicDoodle was very obviously designed to perform these evil tasks to spread itself, even conning Facebook’s own “Photos” app into doing its bidding.
The Insider story concludes with:
Meanwhile, rumors on Twitter that PicDoodle is a virus or phishing scheme appear to be inaccurate.
So who are these guys blowing to get this kind of white-wash?
