• January 25th, 2008
• Filed in
  • Rants

I’m just as shocked as you. I honestly didn’t think the last bastion of social networking, Facebook, was susceptible to spam. I guess that’s just being naive, but just a little while ago I was spammed for the first time on Facebook. I’m not just talking about an annoying app that runs amuck. I’m talking about a spammy ringtones ad on my WALL by one of my sisters long-time friends.

I don’t know what to think about Facebook now. There’s always someone looking for an exploit to make a quick buck. I hope FB puts the kaibosh on this quickly, but it’s always going to be an uphill battle. Unsolicited annoyances like this completely turned me off to Myspace and let me make the jump to Facebook w/ confidence, but today that confidence has waned a bit. Facebook is spamtaculous.

Popularity: 9% [?]

• January 17th, 2008
• Filed in
  • Nonsense
  • Rants
  • Web Development

I was reading a readwriteweb article (Perspective: Myspace Still Kicking Facebook’s Ass in Traffic) on social networks today and they showed some Hitwise data on the most popular social networks (see below).

Chart From Hitwise

I have a MySpace and Facebook profile but I never go on MySpace anymore since FB opened up their network to 3rd party applications. Plus being a web developer I can just tell that FB was built right - as opposed to Myspace which is a giant CF.

So I looked down the list:

1. Myspace - check, I have a profile
2. Facebook - check check, I go there constantly
3. Bebo - Popular in Britain, ok I’m familiar with it
4. BlackPlanet - ???

So I figured I’d check it out. Then I was greeted with THIS Bitch Slapped!!!

Como? Huh? They don’t support the latest version of Camino?

It’s pretty funny that they want you to upgrade to Firefox 2 when Firefox and Camino are both open source projects of the Mozilla Foundation and share exactly the same Gecko rendering engine.

These days with standards based development processes we don’t have to “browser sniff” any longer. If BlackPlanet didn’t get the memo,the right way to go about it is “feature sniffing” with locked down degradation. You should really look into Jeremy Keith’s DOM Scripting and perhaps read A List Apart from time to time. It really pisses me off when I run across this type of neglect on the Internet…

Ongoing List of Neglect

As I find these offenders the list will grow.

• 02/26/08 MakesParties.com
• 03/05/08 Comcast.net

Popularity: 13% [?]