Facebook discloses its users to 3rd party web sites

Q&A with Dave Morin of Facebook

Just a quick post, because what I read at Joshua Porter’s blog somewhat alarms me: Facebook?s Brilliant but Evil design.

I feel more and more reassured at why I don’t use Facebook and have a bad feeling about them.

The gist is this: when you buy something at a participating web site (Ethan Zuckerman shows how it is done at overstock.com), Facebook discloses to that 3rd party web site, that you are a user of Facebook, and hands over some more details about you — while you are only visiting that 3rd party page (and not facebook.com)!!

This goes against the idea of separate Domains on the Internet. Joshua fortunately also goes into technical detail, how this could be done.

In my opinion Facebook users should quit the service and heavily protest against these practices. But I am afraid, few of them will even notice that this is happening.

Posted in Web

This was FOWA Expo 2007

fowa.jpg

I have been attending this year’s Future of Web Apps Expo in London’s ExCeL centre.

There were a ton of interesting speakers and I enjoyed listening a lot. Amongst others there were Steve Souders of Yahoo (High Performance Web Sites), Paul Graham of Y Combinator (The future of web startups), Matt Mullenweg of WordPress.com (The architecture of WordPress.com, he was the only one to go into some detail) and Kevin Rose of digg (Launching Startups).

I also enjoyed Robin Christopherson’s talk very much. He is vision impaired and showed how he browses the web (amazing how fast he had set the speed of his screen reader — I know why and guess that most vision impared people turn up the speed, yet it still feels awkward to listen to it) and which challenges therefore arise. Unfortunately Chris Shiflett only held a workshop which I was not attending.

The conference was clearly not so much for developers (at some points I would have greatly enjoyed some delving into code), so I am trying to keep my eyes open for even nerdier conferences :) Any suggestions?

On the evening of the first day there was a “live” diggnation recorded which was pretty fun.

According to Ryan Carson, he will be publishing audio files of the talks on www.futureofwebapps.com soon. Thanks to Carsonified for installing this great conference. I hope I will be able to return next year.

I have posted more photos to flickr.

fowa, fowa 2007