Fitting the battle of life

Reading this article on the facebook blog, I was interested to learn of what seemed to me a little-publicised ruling against some spammers in Facebook’s favour.

Even if Facebook collect a fraction of the $873million award, that’s quite a lot of money for a company that doesn’t really seem to know how to make any yet. The model is simple: set up a place for spammers to ply their trade and wait for them to come. Sue them, collect as much money from them as you can. Cost to you: negligible (legal costs, but those will be paid out of the settlement, I suppose).

I might do it myself.

The Guardian is reporting that talks between Facebook and Twitter regarding a sale of the latter to the former have died out. Well, thank twit.

I think I completely agree with Jemima Kiss when she says in this article that

though it would undoubtedly take Twitter to a more mainstream audience (Twitter had 6 million users as of last month – Facebook has more than 100m) it would also dilute some of the early adopter power juice of Twitter among a community that is still experimenting with how to use it, rather than pigeon holing it as a lightweight friend updating service

I am a fan of multiple services that do single jobs very well. Facebook isn’t nearly as good as Flickr at photos. Facebook isn’t nearly as good as YouTube at video. Facebook statuses are just not as good as tweets – commenting on other people’s status just isn’t the same as an @reply.

Now, companies working together to integrate services – or preferably, letting people do this by opening up APIs – is something I like to see. Being able to show off your flickr photos or latest tweets on your blog or whathaveyou is a good idea. But yanking Twitter out of its (valuable) niche and forcing it into Facebook wouldn’t have been a good one.

Allow my tweets to appear as statuses, by all means (but looking at my profile recently, I’ve decided I might stop that due to sheer volume), but do it by allowing applications to use each service’s APIs. Too many technologies/webapps owned by one webapp to rule them all just doesn’t appeal to me.

Would have been better two release ago, and it would have been facebook and f-spot in feisty for alliterative goodness, but oh well.

The previous facebook plugin for f-spot (0.95) was pretty broken, and the online facebook uploader won’t work with Firefox 3 at the moment, which sucks a little because photos is an application I use quite a lot – I’m now up to 35 albums, many of which have the full 60 photos in them.

So imagine my delight when I realise there’s a new version of the plugin available (0.96) which does indeed work. I had a few glitches getting the log-in working, but once it did I was able to export photos to facebook without a hitch. The plugin allows you to create a new album or add photos to an existing album, add captions, and right-clicking brings up a ‘Who’s in this photo?’ dialogue, although that’s quite buggy (and by quite buggy, I mean, I won’t be using it because the dialogue doesn’t seem to work at all, and doesn’t come off the screen until you close f-spot).

Uploaded photos require your approval when you open the album online, but this is standard facebook behaviour.

I saw a friend exporting photos to an album from iPhoto (is it called that?) on his Mac last summer, so we’re a little behind with a fully functioning version, but at least it now works for me.

[On a side note, f-spot very rarely exits gracefully on my system, always requiring a force quit. Anyone else have this problem?]

Well, everyone knows what facebook does, right? It’s a social networking site, the bane of productivity and a spam folder for all those useless applications you’ll never use, yes?

Check out mirror.facebook.com. It’s a repository for plenty of open-source applications.  Who’d have thunk it?

This is a wonderful story about how the French press was so easily deluded by things that were said and done on Facebook, believing them to be true. Moral of the story: just because it’s in a book (or newspaper) doesn’t make it true.