Socks and Sandals

Usually when I prognosticate about the far-flung future, I’m wrong. However, in the case of Facebook I think I will go out on a limb and say that the only thing that can save them from a very embarrassing spiral into nothingness is money. Cash. Duchets. That’s it. Not all the awesome people plucked from Google , not the huge numbers of pageviews they accrue and certainly not Mark Zuckerberg. Here’s what I mean:

Right now, Facebook is a novelty and has a novelty sheen to it. Right now, its not that annoying and the controls and UI and social navigation are pretty good. However, if it remains so, this is all it will be and its users will flow to the next hot new cool awesomr 2.0 beta thing that comes out. Facebook knows this. Hell, it did it to MySpace (well, with some help from MySpace itself).

So, the only thing that can ever take Facebook to that massive IPO is a revenue stream. And I’m talking a big one. Who’s revenue stream is that big? Microsoft. Oracle. GE. Siemens. Oh yeah, they’re not going to get into any of those games. But Google’s revenue stream looks pretty awesome, too. Why should Google get all that cash? I mean, really… all they do is let you find any information you want on the web in under 0.5 seconds. Who needs that? I’d rather be biting my friends and turning them into werewolves and zombies, to be quite honest. And Facebook just kicks ass for that.

Alas, that revenue stream has to come from somewhere and Facebook is looking to advertisers to shell out a bit more than they already do to take them there. Sure, Microsoft pitched in a bit and caused a huge shitstorm of press that has every idiot on the Web talking about how Facebook is worth $15 billion right now. But, anyone who actually knows anything knows that this isn’t true and both Facebook and Microsoft are the most aware of this fact (with Google right behind them in that race).

So that’s not the way to get money because that won’t last. And, as everyone knows, their banner ads as currently implemented are about as useful as syphllis. So, what to do? Well, I guess they have to roll their own ad network using their massive social graph data. Great idea! But how to do it? Seems like they’ve chosen just about the most devious way possible to accomplish this goal.

The problem with Facebook’s ad profile is twofold:

• I don’t want everyone I am linked to knowing what I am buying, and
• They’ve hidden the opt-out so well that this will eventually become “Facebook spam”

Why? Well, because maybe I don’t want everyone I am linked to on Facebook (shocker! not all of them are people I know really well!) to know everything I buy online. Imagine this scenario: you buy a book called “Inside American Terrorists” because it looks interesting. How do you think that will look to your coworkers checking out your profile? Or how about the “Bankruptcy for Dummies” book, Valtrex pills or a Swedish penis pump? Sound like purchases you want your entire 500+ friend network to know about? I think not.

The one great thing about Facebook right now is that there is no spam. None. Its not possible to get spam on Facebook right now because the platform itself functions as a sort of challenge/response system, allowing only the people you specifically accept to communicate with you. You can block and/or ignore anything that comes your way that you don’t like and you’ll never hear from it again. Not so with the Facebook Ad Network.

Facebook’s ad platform will allow each retailer/online business to put you through the whole subversive opt-out process again and again. There’s no way to globally opt-out, or better yet, to opt-in to the process in the first place and not have any ads show up at all. We already know that most people don’t understand that the word “sponsored” is synonomous with “advertisement” from the vast number of people who don’t realize that those links on the right-hand side of the search results are ads, so there’s no chance of just slapping that on each entry will keep anyone honest.

I for one believe that this could go one of two ways: Either nobody cares and Facebook makes a ton, or they annoy the shit out of their users and flame out quickly with many funny articles from Ted to help us through the pain. I’m thinking that the latter is more likely at this point.

My plan is to write a Firefox extension that will refuse to serve Facebook cookies unless the actual domain being visited is facebook.com (not just an iframe inside another domain’s page). This will defeat the Facebook Ad Network attempts to subvert my profile quite soundly. I will of course be opening this up to anyone who wants a taste for nothing, just as soon as I get some time to bang it out. More on that as it comes up.

Here’s hoping everyone just shuts up about Facebook because there’s just not that much there right now. Help me do something that I can’t do with IM or Twitter or Flickr and I’ll be singing your praises. Facebook: Show me you’ve got something of value other than my purchase history.

My startup Commerce360 is one of the seven finalists for the Amazon Startup Challenge out of close to a thousand entries. I’m very excited that we made the finals of this contest and I’m looking forward to going out to Seattle to pitch our company to Amazon and see what they think. The announcement is here and if you are looking to optimize your online marketing efforts, take a look at our product ClickEquations .

According to Pankaj Ghemawat and Ramon Casadesus-Masanell of Harvard Business School free isn’t good enough to destroy Windows . I found this piece pretty fascinating as it is the first formal model of the Microsoft vs. Open Source debate that I’ve seen and there was plenty in there that was outside of the current zeitgeist. I had heard that Microsoft secretly loved piracy but I hadn’t really thought about what that would mean for Linux making inroads into China (implicitly referred to in the article). China is the biggest battleground for the Microsoft vs. Linux battle and pretty much the last one of any consequence in the operating system wars (barring a new kind of computational model, of course). It is pretty telling, though, that only two of the biggest Internet success stories of today are running Windows: eBay and Myspace. Shows where today’s developers heads are. Definitely give the article a good read.

Having just come off of 5 years in anti-spam, an idea like this one strikes me as hilariously dumb. Here’s how I see this one playing out:

Printing noise from the kitchen during Grandma’s weekly bridge game…

Grandma: Ooh, I must be getting some new pictures from my daughter of the grandkids on their vacation to DisneyWorld!

Four women cozy into the kitchen to see a piece of porn image spam printing out…

Grandma’s friend: DisneyWorld sure has changed since last time I was there…

Economics, people. Economics.

In the words of the immortal uncov , FAIL . FUCKING FAIL , in fact. Definitely listen to the whole first one: there are some choice quotes in there.

Its about time! I’ve upgraded the blog to Typo 4.1.1 . I also have a new RSS feed for this blog here . If you are subbed right now, you should switch to this new feed URL as I will be turning off the old one after a while.

I was previously running on 2.6.0 since the inception of this blog and I was just lazy in getting around to upgrading. Of course, I just spent the last hour tweaking things and changing themes and marking comments and trackbacks as ham/spam, but hey… what are Sundays for? Hope you all enjoy the new digs. Here’s hoping that Dreamhost’s FastCGI will somehow be improved by this upgrade ;)

Apparently, its not just software engineers that can’t estimate how long a project will take . I thought maybe we were alone in that, given all of the high-tower thinkers spouting off about how other engineering disciplines always succeed in their endeavors and software rarely does. Looks like maybe no one’s got it all figured out just yet, eh?

This article was especially pertinent to me now since I am responsible for coming up with these kinds of schedules at work these days. I’m not too far along in my EBS implementation but I’m hoping that can offset some of the pain of project estimation.

I just got back from RubyConf 2007 tonight and it was awesome! The conference was a well-oiled machine with superb content and attendees. My only beef, and this is small, is that the hotel Wifi was a bit weak, but that’s to be expected.

Confreaks video-taped the whole conference, including RejectConf and they said the video will be available for streaming and download sometime next week. Their videos are awesome so you should definitely check them out.

The level of conversation in the hallways and taverns was just unreal. There were so many smart people there working on really great stuff that I didn’t know who to talk to next!

Evan’s keynote was probably the best talk of the conference for me, but I’m a bit biased towards Rubinius, given my previous issues with the MRI as it stands today . Francis Hwang’s talk was the most intriguing and made me think the most. Ryan Davis’s talk was packed and really entertaining. I missed Laurent’s talk but it was similarly packed and people said it was hyper-cool. Eric’s talk was really awesome, too, as he was giving us all his tips about how to stay productive: coming from a guy with 40+ open source projects under his belt, that’s definitely good info.

Some highlights for me, in no particular order:

• Got to meet Tim Bray and he’s just as sharp as I though, if not sharper
• Met some of the Twitter guys and they are really, really cool, down-to-earth dudes
• I finally got to meet Matz in person and I used the opportunity to interrogate him on the state of Ruby’s GC
• Ryan Davis and Francis Hwang gave me some really good tips on testing and I am very grateful for that
• Had a couple really good conversations with Evan Phoenix ; man
  • He’s one smart-ass cookie and a great showman, too
• Hung out with a bunch of really smart and interesting Rubyists, including Obie Fernandez and Steven Bristol
• Talked to Ezra a bunch about Merb and Engine Yard and got to meet Yehuda Katz
• Played in a video-taped Werewolf game with some of the best Rubyists in the world (who shall remain nameless at this time because the game became… uh, lets say “controversial”)

There wasn’t a lot of Rails-related stuff there (which was good) and the people who were there were really into Ruby, not just Rails. DHH didn’t even show up so the noise level was low.

I’m definitely going to be going to RubyConf 2008. Thanks to Rich, David and Chad for an awesome conference!

This is getting really old, really fast. Now the Charlotte hotel I am staying in also proxies port 25 and fails to proxy SMTP AUTH. WTF? And they are using Symantec Mail Security, a product from the division where I used to work! Sheesh… Anyway, its really Mailstreet’s fault for not listening on 587 in the first place.