30 Blogger Widgets and Plugins

1. Top Commentators Widget by BloggerPlugins - This excellent plugin has two versions. One for blogs having small number of comments and the second variant for blogs receiving lots of comments.

2. Translation Widget by BloggerPlugins - This one click install widget add multiple language translation support to your blogger blog.

3. Recent Post Widget by BloggerPlugins - This is highly customizable widget. You can set number of posts to display, post summary and it's length.

4. Recent Comments Widget by BloggerPlugins - A highly customizable widget. You can set the number of comments to display, author name, date and size of comment. You can also use CSS to gel it with your theme.

5. Label Cloud Plugin by phydeaux3 - This is one of the most popular label cloud generation plugin for blogger. You can customize various options after installing this plugin.

6. Archive Calendar Widget by PurpleMoggy - Very impressive archive calendar widget with customizable options.

7. Archive Calendar Widget by phydeaux3 - Another very popular archive calendar widget. Highly customizable for better browsing experience for the readers.

8. Recent Posts Widget by Feed2JS - This excellent plugin makes plugin installation and customization very easy. Just fill in the form and click the button to generate widget code.

9. Recent Comments Widgets by Blogger-Templates - Just fill in the options in the form and one click widget code generation. Excellent plugin which is highly customizable.

10. Picasa Web Albums Slideshow Widget by Blogger Templates Designs - A unique plugin to show photo slideshow from any picasa account. Ideal for personal blogs, photo blogs and web design blogs.

11. Search Form Widget by Blogger Templates Designs - If you want to add site search box in your blog's sidebar, install this plugin.

12. Google Talk Widget by Blogger Templates Designs - This plugin adds the Google Talk client to your blog so that your readers can directly converse with you.

13. Recent Comments Widget by Blogger Templates Designs - Yet another recent comments widget with customizable options and one-click install.

14. Sudoku Game Widget by Blogger Templates Designs - Want to add some interesting puzzle games for your visitors? Then install this plugin to integrate sudoku puzzle game in your blogger blog.

15. Google Translate Mini-Flags Widget by MadToMatoe - Very useful translation plugin powered by 'Google Translate'. One click install with multiple language translation facility.

16. Recent Comments Widgets by MadToMatoe - One more recent comments widget for blogger blogs. Again you can customize the number of recent comments to be displayed.

17. Reactions Mini-Poll Widget by ThemeLib - Want to host a poll on your blogger blog? Install this plugin and get customizable polls for your readers.

18. Alexa Traffic Widget by TechKnowl - Display your Alexa stats with this customizable widget.

19. Snow Flakes Widget by TechKnowl - Add a stunning snowfall effect in your blogger template in the festive season.

20. Popular Posts Widget by TechKnowl - A very simple popular posts plugin using Yahoo pipes to filter out popular posts on your blog.

21. Flash MP3 Player Widget by TechKnowl - This cool plugin allows you to embed flash mp3 player in your blogger blog. The player is very light with custom options.

22. Rating Widget by Outbrain - If you want to integrate rating system with your blogger posts, then this excellent plugin is the best choice. It has rating system plus related posts integration in same widget.

23. Multi-tab TOC Widget by Beautiful Beta - If you want to display multi-tab table of contents section in your blogger blog, then install this widget. Very popular among blogger users.

24. Tab View Widget by Hoctro - The coolest plugin showing tabbed posts with animated post excerpts. A must for your blog's sidebar.

25. Random/Rotating Banner Widget by FreeYaSoul - Very useful widget for displaying rotating banners in your blog's header. You can customize and can choose any number of headers.

26. Social Bookmarking Widget by Lasvak - This is perhaps the most easily installable bookmarking widget for blogger. Just copy and paste a single line of code in your blogger template and your bookmarking icons are ready.

27. Paypal Donation Widgets by Etienne - Integrate different types of paypal donation widget in your blogger blog with ease.

28. Podcating Plugin by Talkr - If you want to integrate podcasts to your blog, register for this service and get free podcasting plugin for your blogger blog.

29. What's Next? Section Widget by eblogtemplates - Integrate a Wordpress style 'What's Next' section below blogger posts with this excellent widget.

30. Twitter Profile Widget by BloggerBuster - Add your twitter profile and twitter updates with this useful plugin developed by Amanda Fazani.

31. Bookmarking Widget by SocioFluid - One of the best social bookmarking plugin for blogger. Big animated icons with one click installation.

32. Advanced Recent Comments Widget by Csabi - This is highly customizable recent comments widget. The number of configurable options provided by this widget makes it one of the best recent comment widgets for blogger platform.

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Some Google employees defect, then rebel

Brian Kennish traded his job at Google for a table at Starbucks, where he works on his privacy software called Disconnect. [Image: CNN]

Many computer engineers consider a job offer from Google as the golden ticket. Outdoor volleyball courts, free gourmet food, on-site haircuts, massages and laundry are among the perks Google has offered its employees at its main campus in Mountain View, California. But some of the people who do leave are challenging the company in the best way an engineer knows how: by developing programs that could detract from Google's core business.

Brian Kennish worked at Google for seven years, managing teams of engineers on a variety of products such as the Chrome browser and the moribund Google Wave.

Near the end of his stint at Google, Kennish developed a browser extension for Chrome called Facebook Disconnect.

The software blocks websites that have Facebook widgets installed from automatically sending information about the user back to the social networking company. Facebook Disconnect has 75,000 users, Kennish said.

"No one at Google asked me to do it," Kennish told CNN this week.

What sparked Kennish's project, he said, was reading the recent scrutiny of online data-collection tactics chronicled by news organizations. The Wall Street Journal has been running a series called "What They Know," and CNN had its own last week called "End of Privacy."

While Facebook and the applications that run on its platform can be considered personal-data hoarders, Kennish eventually realized his then-employer was, itself, among the biggest collectors. To name a few practices, Google can track search queries over time, target ads to its Gmail users based on the contents of e-mails, and use a person's location data to determine which shops' ads it will show. Google, like many Web advertising companies, uses small files called cookies to track internet surfing habits in order to better target ads.

"I never worked directly with user data," Kennish said of his time at Google. "I didn't have a good sense of what was being collected. Privacy wasn't a passion of mine or something that I knew a lot about until basically two months ago, when I started reading about this stuff."

Kennish left Google in November to focus more on programs that empower people to take control of their privacy online. "I had this holy-cow moment when I realized what was going on," Kennish said. "There's just so much unknown about what's being done with this data." "I think there is a good reason to be concerned with it all and, frankly, to be fearful of it," he said.

Last week, he released a second browser extension, another tool for Google Chrome, called Disconnect. Once installed, the program blocks major internet companies, including Google, from installing cookies on -- and thus tracking -- a computer. People using Disconnect can decide which cookies they'd like to allow onto their system. Cookies can be helpful when, for example, you'd like a website to remember your login credentials and not ask for them every time you visit.

"I would like to see us move to a point where all the data that's collected about folks is intentional," rather than without people's knowledge, Kennish said. "So if I give you permission to collect my data, then go ahead and do it." In its first week, 25,000 people downloaded Disconnect. Kennish is releasing a new version Friday that lets users choose whether Google can personalize search queries based on the data it has about the person. By default, Disconnect blocks Google from doing this.

"Any data that's collected has the potential to escape the collector," Kennish said. "So I would like to see Google only collect data that I explicitly allow them to collect." Google hosts a dashboard for users to review a breakdown of the messages and information attached to their accounts. The Google Privacy Center provides information on how the company collects data and lets people, whether they're registered with Google or not, opt out of ad and analytics tracking.

Michael Gundlach, another ex-Google engineer, developed an alternative to complicated opt-out systems that vary between ad networks. Like Disconnect, it's a browser extension, and there are versions for Chrome and Apple's Safari.

Called AdBlock, Gundlach's program can prevent Web pages from loading and displaying ads. That includes Google's ads, which account for the vast majority of the search giant's revenue. AdBlock offers a setting to easily enable ads from Gundlach's former employer, though those ads are disabled by default. "Google didn't ask me to put that in," Gundlach wrote in an e-mail. "I find Google text ads to be useful."

Still, Gundlach says he blocks most ads because "I don't wish to be bombarded by consumerism."

The real economic conundrum: If website visitors don't pay figuratively -- by watching ads or by having their personal information sent to advertisers -- they may have to start paying real money for online services.

Kennish plans to devote six months to developing Disconnect and will reevaluate then whether it could be a sustainable business.

He's "pretty close" to releasing an extension for Safari and recently began working on one for Firefox, he said. If he's forced to abandon the project, the source code is freely available to any enterprising developers who want to take up the cause. "The only business model I see," Kennish said, is to eventually provide a more advanced version of the software that costs money.

"When I use something like Google, I'm paying for Google with my attention and my data," he said. "There's no such thing as free. These are companies that have to pay employees' salaries."

Parts of Google's maturing business may clash with some of the wide-eyed engineers it hopes to attract, especially those passionate about taking risks to change the world, hopefully for the better.

But a Google spokesman, who declined to comment on most questions pertaining to this story, said the company's attrition rate -- that is, the percentage of employees that defect -- hasn't changed in more than seven years and is better than the industry standard.In addition to all the on-campus amenities, a program called "20% Time" lets Google engineers devote a sizable chunk of their work weeks to projects of their choosing. (Kennish said he developed Facebook Disconnect after work hours)

The perks haven't stopped some high-profile people from leaving the company. Product designer Douglas Bowman left in a huff last year for a job at Twitter after reportedly becoming fed up with nearly three years of what he publicly described as Google's design-by-committee mentality. Some notable Google alumni are spiting their former employer in a different way -- by joining Facebook. The social network is perceived by some as Google's biggest rival. People are spending more of their time online using Facebook. They're thumbing through photos and asking questions to friends, rather than searching the wider Web. Google is unable to crawl most of the data posted to Facebook.As Google-to-Facebook defections grow, Google is reportedly offering some employees multimillion-dollar packages to convince them not to go to Facebook.

After wooing executives who worked on Google-owned YouTube, Android and advertising; the architect of Google Maps; and at least two Gmail co-founders, this week, Facebook claimed Paul Adams, a former Google employee who was previously an outspoken critic of the social network. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's venerable chief operating officer, also came from the big G.

But abandoning Google hasn't always proved to be a wise or permanent move. Anna Patterson left the company in 2007 to start a rival search engine called Cuil. When that tanked, she returned to Google in September.

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The major incidents on the Internet in 2010

In what has become something of a yearly tradition, it’s now time for us to present 10 of the most noteworthy incidents on the Internet from this past year. As you’ll see, 2010 has been very interesting.
Just like previous years, we have included problems ranging from website outages and service issues to large-scale network interruptions. If you’re an avid Web user, you are bound to recognize several of them. Let’s get started! The major incidents on the Internet in 2010 were…

Wikipedia’s failover fail

Wikipedia has become so ubiquitous that it can’t go down for a minute without people noticing. According to Google Trends for Websites, the site has roughly 50 million visitors per day.

In March, when servers in Wikimedia’s European data center overheated and shut down, the service was supposed to fail over to a US data center. Unfortunately, the failover mechanism didn’t work properly and broke the DNS lookups for all of Wikipedia. This effectively rendered the site unreachable worldwide. It took several hours before everyone could access the site again.

WordPress.com’s big-blog crash

WordPress.com got a pretty bad start this year when a network issue caused the biggest outage the service had seen in four years. The outage became extra noticeable not just because of the sheer number of blogs it hosts (at the time 10 million, now many more), but also because so many high-profile blogs use it. The WordPress.com outage took down blogs such as TechCrunch, GigaOM and the Wired blogs for almost two hours in February.

Gmail’s multiple outages

Gmail is one of the world’s most popular email services, and is an integral part of Google Apps. Unfortunately, it’s had several notable outages this year. These issues haven’t always affected Gmail’s entire user base, but enough of it to make headlines in the news.

In February, a routine maintenance caused a disruption that cascaded from data center to data center, knocking out Gmail worldwide for about 2.5 hours. In March, Gmail had an issue that lasted as much as 36 hours for some users. Another incident happened early in September, when overloaded routers made the service completely unavailable for almost two hours.

China reroutes the Internet

In April, China Telecom spread incorrect traffic routes to the rest of the Internet. In this specific case it meant that during 18 minutes, potentially as much as 15% of the traffic on the Internet was sent via China because routers believed it was the most effective route to take.

Similar incidents have happened before, for example when YouTube was hijacked globally by a small Pakistani ISP two years ago. Normally this results in a crash since the ISP can’t handle the traffic. However, China Telecom was able to handle the traffic, so most people never noticed this. At most they noticed increased latency as traffic to the affected networks took a very long and awkward route across the Internet (via China).

Even though no serious outage happened as a result of this, we think it’s such a fascinating disruption of the traffic flow that we felt it was worth including here. This is an inherent weakness of today’s Internet infrastructure, which largely relies on the honor system. Renesys has a more in-depth explanation of this incident and how it could happen. We should state that it wasn’t necessarily an intentional hijacking.

Twitter’s World Cup woes

Twitter seemed like the ideal companion to the World Cup (soccer to you Americans, football to the rest of the world, John Cleese explains it best). Tweeting about the World Cup proved so popular that it slowed down or broke Twitter several times during the weeks of the event. The upside is that this effectively load tested Twitter’s infrastructure, revealing potential weaknesses. As a result, Twitter’s service today is most likely more stable than it might otherwise have been.

Facebook’s feedback loop

Facebook has become a true juggernaut with more than 500 million users. That hasn’t changed its development philosophy, “don’t be afraid to break things.” This aggressive approach to speedy development has been key to Facebook’s success, but, well, sometimes it will break things.

Facebook’s worst outage in four years came in September when a seemingly innocent update to Facebook’s backend code caused a feedback loop that completely overloaded its databases. The only way for Facebook to recover was to take down the entire site and remove the bad code before taking the site back online. Facebook was offline for approximately 2.5 hours.

Foursquare’s double whammy

Foursquare’s location-based social network has been a resounding success and has in little time gathered a following of millions, so when the service went down for roughly 11 hours early in October, people of course noticed. The culprit was an overloaded database. And as if to add insult to injury, almost exactly the same thing happened the day after, taking the site down for an additional six hours.

Paypal’s payment problems

When Paypal stumbles, so do the many thousands of merchants that rely on Paypal to handle payments, not to mention the millions of regular consumers who use Paypal for their online payments. You can imagine the effect, and sales lost, if Paypal stops working for hours on end. Which was exactly what happened in October when a problem with Paypal’s network equipment crippled the service for as much as 4.5 hours. At its peak the issue affected all of Paypal’s members worldwide for 1.5 hours.

Tumblr’s tumble

Tumblr was (and still is) one of the great social media successes of 2010, but with rapid growth comes scalability challenges. This has become increasingly noticeable, and culminated with a 24-hour outage early in December when all of Tumblr’s 11 million blogs were offline due to a broken database cluster.

The Wikileaks drama

If you’ve missed this you must have been hiding under a rock, which in turn was buried below a mountain of rocks. The site issues that Wikileaks experienced during the so-called Cablegate were significant. First the site was the victim of a large-scale distributed denial-of-service attack which forced Wikileaks to switch to a different web host. After Wikileaks moved to Amazon EC2 to better handle the increased traffic, Amazon soon shut them down. In addition to this, several countries blocked access to the Wikileaks site. And then the possibly largest blow came when the DNS provider for the official Wikileaks.org domain, EveryDNS, shut down the domain itself.

Without a working domain name in place, Wikileaks could for a time only be reached by its IP address. Since then, Wikileaks has spread itself out, mirroring the content over hundreds of sites and different domain names, including a new main site at Wikileaks.ch.

As if this wasn’t enough drama, you have to add the reactions from some of Wikileaks’ supporters (not from Wikileaks itself). The services that cut off Wikileaks in various ways (Paypal, VISA, Mastercard, Amazon, EveryDNS, etc.) were subjected to distributed denial-of-service attacks from upset supporters across the world, which resulted in even more downtime. There was also collateral damage, when some attackers mistook the DNS provider EasyDNS for EveryDNS, aiming their attacks at the wrong target.


The Wikileaks drama is without a doubt the Internet incident of the year.

Final words:
The events we have listed here above really are just a small sample of everything that has happened in 2010. Even without Wikileaks, it’s been a very eventful year on the Internet. That said, this is something we find ourselves saying every year. The truth is that the Internet is not quite as stable and solid as most of us would like to believe. It’s a complex system, like a living organism, and things do break from time to time. Sometimes it’s small-scale enough that nobody notices, and sometimes hundreds of millions of people are affected.
Hopefully 2011 will be a less eventful year, but we wouldn’t count on it.

If you feel we missed something major, please let us know in the comments!

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Observations from Facebook networking map for December 2010.

Click on the image for a better resolution (3.5MB image)

Observations:

1. North America: Most of the north Canada is not inhabited, which reflects in the map. Alaska is poorly connected to the internet (Which is, well, Facebook, actually) The western part of USA (Rocky mountains, Death valley) is not as densely connected to Facebook as much as the eastern part (New York to Texas)
2. Central America: Medium density of the network lines suggests medium Facebook usage.
3. South America: Brazil is not a part of Facebook, according to the map. Probably because Brazilians are busy Orkuting. Certain cities like Rio De Janerio can be seen in the map. Argentine cities like Buenos Aires and surroundings can be seen in the map. Falkland Island (surprisingly) can be seen in the map too.
4. Europe: Leaving aside parts of Spain, north Scandinavia which has medium density of the network lines, all other parts of Europe show high Facebook usage.
5. Africa: Parts of Morocco, north Egypt, coastal Nigeria and Niger, South Africa and what I think is Kenya, are connected to Facebook. Most of the Africa is still in the dark.
6. Asia: India and Turkey are the brightest spots on the Asian map with regular Facebook users in Iraq, Kuwait, other gulf countries, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Thailand, Indonesia, HK, Singapore and Taiwan. Coastal region on China can be seen on the map with a small population choosing to (or being allowed to) Facebook. Most of the former USSR nations in Asia are non-existent on the map.
7. Australia: The eastern Australian cities like Sydney and Canberra dominate the western cities like Perth in terms of Facebook usage. Almost the entire NZ Facebooks, according to the map. A small population in Tasmania Facebooks as well.

Surprising observations:

1. Almost the entire Hawaii islands can be seen on the map.
2. Western coast of Greenland has marginal connection with Canada in terms of Facebook users.
3. Islands like Madagascar and Mauritius can be seen on the map as well.
4. Russia is almost entirely in the dark.

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The Best Movies for Programmers

If you’ve done even a little programming then you’re also good at finding ways to waste time watching things vaguely related to it.  Admit it, you’ve spent at least a few hours watching videos about Android’s latest features or Chrome’s Internals even though you’ll never write a single line of code for either.  Don’t worry, I’m not going to list a bunch of technical talks.  We’re talking entertainment for after the work day.  The following movies are stimulating to watch for those with a programming oriented mind.  And you know what that means, softcore porn!

Welcome to Macintosh

Netflix Streaming? Yes
Apple documentary that does a great job tracking the reasons for its successes and failures. I wasn’t sure I’d like the movie after reading the description on Netflix, but once the interview with a grumpy and inebriated ex-Apple Engineer started I was sold.  Just gets better from there.

The IT Crowd

Netflix Streaming? Yes, series 1, 2, and 3.  4 is available on iTunes for ten bucks.
Lets face it, if you’ve done any programming at all then you’re also the go to IT person for your entire extended family.  Over Thanksgiving I’m sure everyone one of you spent at least a few hours exercising the Tech Support Cheat Sheet.  The main focus of this show quickly diverges from IT, but each episode still includes references to nerd popculture.

We Live in Public

Netflix Streaming? Yes
I can’t believe I had never heard of Pseudo.  If you haven’t, then make this the first movie you watch off this list.  You’ll be shocked that something like this existed in the late 90’s.  Also a bit of nudity sprinkled throughout, just for fun.

The Social Network

Netflix Streaming? No, not even out on DVD yet I’ll leave this description up to the awesome blogger, Mike Rundle:
“The Social Network was fucking awesome. Do not see it if you have an idea in your head because it’ll make you want to work on it 24/7.”

Hackers

Netflix Streaming? Yes
I had to include it, this one is sentimental for me.  It was the first movie I had seen that showed computer nerds in an enviable light and not as pariahs being put in lockers.  The brief sensual scene with Angelina Jolie made this a childhood favorite.

Pirates of Silicon Valley

Netflix Streaming? No, but you can watch it on Google Video.
Yea I can’t believe that’s still around either. I’ll admit it, I’m too young to have actually been paying attention when the events of this movie were actually taking place, it gives a nice synopsis of how Microsoft and Apple ended up where they were in the late 90’s.

Revolution OS

Netflix Streaming? Yes
Some nerd cred if you ever wind up trapped in the same room as an old Cobol sysadmin.

Office Space

Netflix Streaming? No
This one is last because I’d be really freaking surprised if you haven’t seen it.  It will help you better understand why that creep guy in your office covets his red stapler.

That’s it!  Please let me know if you have any other favorites that I did not list in the comments below.  I’ll watch them, and if I get enough suggestions I’ll post a second list in the future.

BTW, I can't believe they left out Primer.

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Get me on twitter.com/GuyWhoSteals. Fuck Facebook :/

Facebook privacy policies keep going down the drain. That’s enough reason for many to abandon it. Here you will find nine more:

After some reflection, I’ve decided to delete my account on Facebook. I’d like to encourage you to do the same. This is part altruism and part selfish. The altruism part is that I think Facebook, as a company, is unethical. The selfish part is that I’d like my own social network to migrate away from Facebook so
that I’m not missing anything. In any event, here’s my “Top Ten” reasons for why you should join me and many others and delete your account.


10. Facebook’s Terms Of Service are completely one-sided


Let’s start with the basics. Facebook’s Terms Of Service state that not only do they own your data (section 2.1), but if you don’t keep it up to date and accurate (section 4.6), they can terminate your account (section 14). You could argue that the terms are just protecting Facebook’s interests, and are not in practice enforced, but in the context of their other activities, this defense is pretty weak. As you’ll see, there’s no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt. Essentially, they see their customers as unpaid employees for crowd-sourcing ad-targeting data.


9. Facebook’s CEO has a documented history of unethical behavior


From the very beginning of Facebook’s existence, there are questions about Zuckerberg’s ethics. According to BusinessInsider.com, he used Facebook user data to guess email passwords and read personal email in order to discredit his rivals. These allegations, albeit unproven and somewhat dated, nonetheless raise
troubling questions about the ethics of the CEO of the world’s largest social network. They’re particularly compelling given that Facebook chose to fork over $65M to settle a related lawsuit alleging that Zuckerberg had actually stolen the idea for Facebook.


8. Facebook has flat out declared war on privacy


Founder and CEO of Facebook, in defense of Facebook’s privacy changes last January: “People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.” More recently, in introducing the Open Graph API: “… the default is now social.” Essentially, this means Facebook not only wants to know everything about you, and own that data, but to make it available to everybody. Which would not, by itself, necessarily be unethical, except that...


7. Facebook is pulling a classic bait-and-switch


At the same time that they’re telling developers how to access your data with new APIs, they are relatively quiet aboutexplaining the implications of that to members. What this amounts to is a bait-and-switch. Facebook gets you to share information that you might not otherwise share, and then they make it publicly
available. Since they are in the business of monetizing information about you for advertising purposes, this amounts to tricking their users into giving advertisers information about themselves. This is why Facebook is so much worse than Twitter in this regard: Twitter has made only the simplest (and thus, more credible) privacy claims and their customers know up front that all their tweets are public. It’s also why the FTC is getting involved, and people are suing them (and winning).
Check out this excellent timeline from the EFF documenting the changes to Facebook’s privacy policy.


6. Facebook is a bully


When Pete Warden demonstrated just how this bait-and-switch works (by crawling all the data that Facebook’s privacy settings changes had inadvertently made public) they sued him. Keep in mind, this happened just before they announced the Open Graph API and stated that the “default is now social.” So why sue an independent software developer and fledgling entrepreneur for making data publicly available when you’re actually already planning to do that yourself? Their real agenda is pretty clear: they don’t want their membership to know how much data is really available. It’s one thing to talk to developers about how
great all this sharing is going to be; quite another to actually see what that means in the form of files anyone can download and load into MatLab.


5. Even your private data is shared with applications


At this point, all your data is shared with applications that you install. Which means now you’re not only trusting Facebook, but the application developers, too, many of whom are too small to worry much about keeping your data secure. And some of whom might be even more ethically challenged than Facebook. In
practice, what this means is that all your data – all of it – must be effectively considered public, unless you simply never use any Facebook applications at all. Coupled with the OpenGraph API, you are no longer trusting Facebook, but the Facebook ecosystem.


4. Facebook is not technically competent enough to be trusted


Even if we weren’t talking about ethical issues here, I can’t trust Facebook’s technical competence to make sure my data isn’t hijacked. For example, their recent introduction of their “Like” button makes it rather easy for spammers to gain access to my feed and spam my social network. Or how about this gem for harvesting profile data? These are just the latest of a series of Keystone Kops mistakes, such as accidentally making users’ profiles completely public, or the cross-site scripting hole that took them over two weeks to fix. They either don’t care too much about your privacy or don’t really have very good engineers, or perhaps both.


3. Facebook makes it incredibly difficult to truly delete your account


It’s one thing to make data public or even mislead users about doing so; but where I really draw the line is that, once you decide you’ve had enough, it’s pretty tricky to really delete your account. They make no promises about deleting your data and every application you’ve used may keep it as well. On top of that, account deletion is incredibly (and intentionally) confusing. When you go to your account settings, you’re given an option to deactivate your account, which turns out not to be the same thing as deleting it. Deactivating means you can still be tagged in photos and be spammed by Facebook (you actually have to opt out of getting emails as part of the deactivation, an incredibly easy detail to overlook, since you think you’re deleting your account). Finally, the moment you log back in, you’re back like nothing ever happened! In fact, it’s really
not much different from not logging in for awhile. To actually delete your account, you have to find a link buried in the on-line help (by “buried” I mean it takes five clicks to get there). Or you can just click here. Basically, Facebook is trying to trick their users into allowing them to keep their data even after they’ve “deleted” their account.


2. Facebook doesn’t (really) support the Open Web


The so-called Open Graph API is named so as to disguise its fundamentally closed nature. It’s bad enough that the idea here is that we all pitch in and make it easier than ever to help Facebook collect more data about you. It’s bad enough that most consumers will have no idea that this data is basically public. It’s bad enough that they claim to own this data and are aiming to be the one source for accessing it. But then they are disingenuous enough to call it “open,” when, in fact, it is completely proprietary to Facebook. You can’t use this feature unless you’re on Facebook. A truly open implementation would work with whichever social network we prefer, and it would look something like OpenLike. Similarly, they implement just enough of OpenID to claim they support it, while aggressively promoting a proprietary alternative, Facebook Connect.


1. The Facebook application itself sucks


Between the farms and the mafia wars and the “top news” (which always guesses wrong – is that configurable somehow?) and the myriad privacy settings and the annoying ads (with all that data about me, the best they can apparently do is promote dating sites, because, uh, I’m single) and the thousands upon thousands of crappy applications, Facebook is almost completely useless to me at this point. Yes, I could probably customize it better, but the navigation is ridiculous, so I don’t bother. (And, yet, somehow, I can’t even change colors or apply themes or do anything to make my page look personalized.) Let’s not even get into how slowly your feed page loads. Basically, at this point, Facebook is more annoying than anything else.
Facebook is clearly determined to add every feature of every competing social network in an attempt to take over the Web (this is a never-ending quest that goes back to AOL and those damn CDs that were practically  falling out of the sky). While Twitter isn’t the most usable thing in the world, at least they’ve tried to stay focused and aren’t trying to be everything to everyone. I often hear people talking about Facebook as though they were some sort of monopoly or public trust. Well, they aren’t. They owe us nothing. They can do whatever they want, within the bounds of the laws. (And keep in mind, even those criteria are pretty murky when it comes to social networking.) But that doesn’t mean we have to actually put up with them. Furthermore, their long-term success is by no means guaranteed – have we all forgotten MySpace? Oh, right, we have. Regardless of the hype, the fact remains that Sergei Brin or Bill Gates or Warren Buffett could personally acquire a majority stake in Facebook without even straining their bank account. And Facebook’s revenue remains more or less a rounding error for more established tech companies. While social networking is a fun new application category enjoying remarkable growth, Facebook isn’t the only game in town. I don’t like their application nor how they do business and so I’ve made my choice to use other providers. And so
can you.


0. Diaspora* is coming!

Does nobody care that Facebook looks like ass?

Sweet holy Buddha, is this really the future that Mark Zuckerberg is damning us to? Below is a screen shot from the big Facebook announcement today, snipped from a slideshow on Huffington Post along with the not-at-all-hyperbolic front page headline (above) declaring that this clusterfuck of ugly fonts and colors is “the way the future should work.”

Dear friends, I beg of you — look down at that page of horrors at the end of this post, and then ask yourself: Really? Can this really be true? Is there really anyone in the entire world who finds this user interface to be attractive?

After all the work I’ve done? After four decades of my Bauhaus-inspired radical minimalism and easy-on-the-eyes simplicity, this nightmare of buttons and icons and random colors, this messy electronic ransom note — this is the future? Do you have any idea how many hours, how many full days and weeks, that I’ve spent agonizing over the amount of white space that should be put at the edge of a screen? How many sleepless nights I’ve spent tossing and turning, my mind racing with decisions about type faces and kerning? And bezels and chamfers?

And now this. This world of shit and poor taste is where half a billion people choose to spend their time.
I look at Facebook and I feel the way I imagine I.M. Pei must feel when he looks at some giant public housing project. You just sit there going, Why? Why do this? Why make it so ugly when for just a tiny bit more effort you could make it, if not beautiful, at least not horrific?

I look at this page and I feel a migraine starting to come on. I feel dizzy, and get tunnel vision, and I have to go sit down on the floor in the child pose and just clear my mind.

It hurts me. Do you understand? It physically friggin hurts.

But this, we are told, is the future of messaging. All of these feeds (IMs, SMS, email) streamed into one giant steaming mountain of crap. Dear friends, this isn’t a product. It’s a punishment. But apparently there is nothing that any of us can do to stop it.