Bjorn Tipling

You might want to reconsider. Take a look at these confused rules about what you can’t do with your facebook application. Here’s a great example:

Present a user with a subsequent friend invite page if the user has already clicked a Facebook-rendered Skip, Cancel, or Skip This Step button, unless the user explicitly selects to invite friends from a page that offers more than just the friend invite option. If the application presents the user with a friend invite page that does not include a Facebook-rendered Skip, Cancel, or Skip This Step button, the application must offer some navigation option to leave the friend invite process, and the application must never present the user with a subsequent friend invite page unless the user explicitly selects to invite friends from a page that offers more than that single option.

What? What if I make a friend-invite page that has a partly Facebook-rendered Skip button that has no other options other than the option to Cancel via a non-Facebook-rendered Withdraw button, which then leads to a Facebook-rendered Cancel page with and without options to not invite none of your friends provided that you hit the Facebook-rendered Skip this step three times previously? What then?

They might want to ease up on the explicit micro-managing and institute some more general ‘best practices.’ I think making a Facebook app can add value to a service or website if you have users asking for it, or if you can plainly see a benefit. Personally I think Facebook applications have gotten out of control, and I see the need to regulate, but there are better ways to do this.

I’ll let Facebook have the last word on this.

If you’re not with us, you’re against us, and Time is not with us. Us being people who use the internet. I don’t know who edits that weekly paper/website/whatever, but their new Top 10 Websites for 2007 list is telling. While everyone else is going gaga over the iPhone being declared the number one gadget of the year, let’s take a look at this list:

1. Lemonade.com
2. AskSunday.com
3. Wink.com
4. TechPresident.com
5. goodreads.com
6. MenuPages.com
7. DontForgetYourToothbrush.com
8. VolunteerMatch.com
9. Fatsecret.com
10. Indeed.com

I’ve never heard of a single one of these. Must be because I’m out of touch with the web. Not enough hours put in I suppose. I’m all for new discovery and such but a top ten list should have top websites? I don’t necessarily mean traffic, but at least importance in our lives, buzz, gradients-rounded-corners-glass-reflection ratio? Even if the list were Top Ten NEW Websites for 2007, this list is out of touch. While goodreads.com and Wink.com, and possibly even Indeed.com are marginally interesting, this list fails to excite. A real top ten list would include Twitter. Could be Time’s intended audience, you know the non-tech savvy ‘regular people’ that are still using IE6 and bugging you for computer help because they clicked on a link in a phishing email.

I kind of want to start blogging, just because I enjoy it and I started up this new blog and I paid for the hosting. I thought I would maybe go and take a comprehensive look at different online social network sites. I’m not really sure yet what kinds of sites I’ll include, it certaintly wont be every site under the sun, just those I find interesting. Easy targets are MySpace and Facebook, but I also want to look at places like Vox and Wordpress and Blogger. This will be a bit of a fluid thing, not very consistent as I’ll learn more as I progress from one site to the next and will be able to evaluate subsequent sites better than previous ones. I don’t know how long or often I will post on this topic. One thing of interest is how networks enable sharing. Sharing of ideas, files, pictures, whatever.