social networking – Page 3

Hello, Facebook; Goodbye, Facebook

Well, that was a farce.

tl;dr: [skip to the end] I’m closing my Facebook account. I’ve got some suggestions at the bottom of this post about how you might like to keep in touch with me in future, if you previously liked to do so via Facebook.

The Backstory

A little over three weeks ago, I was banned from Facebook for having a fake name. This surprised me, because I was using my real name – it’s an unusual name, but it’s mine. I was interested to discover that Claire, who shares my name, hadn’t been similarly banned, so it seems that this wasn’t part of some “sweep” for people with one-letter names, but instead was probably the result of somebody (some stranger, I’d like to hope) clicking the “Report this as a fake name” link on my profile.

Perhaps somebody clicked their way through to this page, and claimed that I was not a "real person".

There are many, many things about this that are alarming, but the biggest is the “block first; ask questions later” attitude. I wasn’t once emailed to warn me that I would be banned. Hell: I wasn’t even emailed to tell me that I had been banned. It took until I tried to log in before I found out at all.

The Problem

I don’t make much use of Facebook, really. I cross-post my blog posts there, and I keep Pidgin signed in to Facebook Chat in case anybody’s looking for me. Oh, and I stalk people from my past, but that’s just about the only thing I do on it that everybody does on it. I don’t really wallpost, I avoid internal messages (replying to them, where possible, by email), and I certainly don’t play fucking FarmVille.

Once, one of my Facebook friends invited me to FarmVille. They're not my Facebook friend any more.

So what’s the problem? It’s not like I’d be missing anything if I barely use it anyway? The problem is that my account was still there, it’s just that I didn’t have access to it.

That meant that people still invited me to things and sent me messages. My friends are smart enough to know that I won’t see anything they write on their wall, but they assume that if they update the information of a party they’ve Facebook-invited me to that I’ll get it. For example, I was recently at a fabulous party at Gareth and Penny‘s which they organised mostly via Facebook. They’d be forgiven for assuming that when they sent a message to “the guests” – a list that included me – that I would get that message: but no – it fell silently away into Facebook’s black hole.

The Farce(book?)

Following this discovery, here’s how I spent the next three weeks:

Facebook gave me a form to fill in when I tried to log in, explaining their “Real Names” policy and asking me to fill in my real name and explain “what I use Facebook for” (“Ignoring friends and stalking exes, same as everybody else,” I explained, “Why; what do YOU use Facebook for?”).
It then asked me to scan and upload some government-issued photographic ID, which I did. It still wouldn’t let me log in, but it promised that somebody would look at my ID soon (and then destroy their copy) and re-enable my account.
I periodically tried to log in over the next few days, without success: I was to wait, I was told.
After about a week, I received an email from “Rachel” at Facebook, who explained the “Real Names” policy and asked me to provide my REAL name, and a scan of some photographic ID. I replied to explain that I’d already done this once, but complied with her request anyway.
Another few days passed, and I still hadn’t heard anything, so I filled in the Contact Forms in the Help section of Facebook, asking to have my request processed by an actual human being. I provided by ID yet again.
Another few days later, I received an email from “Aoife” at Facebook. It was pretty-much exactly the same as the earlier email from Rachel. I replied to explain that we’d been through this already. I supplied another pile of photo ID, and a few sarcastic comments.

A real person, with a real name, holding two examples of his real government-issued photographic ID. I wonder how long it would take a smart person to look at a scan of that ID and say, "Yeah, this person's real enough to be allowed to post pictures of cats on his wall, again."

Another couple of days passed, so I dug up the postal addresses of Facebook’s HQ, and Mark Zuckerberg‘s new Palo Alto house (he’s tried to keep it secret, but the Internet is pretty good at this kind of detective work), and sent each of them a letter explaining my predicament.
Yet more days passed, and we reached the third week of my ban. I replied to Rachel and Aoife, asking how long this was likely to take.
Finally, a little over three weeks after the ban was first put in place, it was lifted. I received an email from Aoife:

Hi Dan,

Thanks for verifying your identity. Note that we permanently deleted your attached ID from our servers.

After investigating this further, it looks like we suspended your account by mistake. I’m so sorry for the inconvenience. You should now be able to log in. If you have any issues getting back into your account, please let me know.

Thanks,

Aoife
User Operations
Facebook

The Resolution

So now, I’m back on Facebook, and I’ve learned something: having a Facebook account that you can’t log in to is worse than not having a Facebook account at all. If I didn’t have one at all, at least people would know that they couldn’t contact me that way. In my situation, Facebook were effectively lying to my friends: telling them “Yeah, sure: we’ll pass on your message to Dan!” and then not doing so. It’s a little bit like digital identity theft, and it’s at least a little alarming.

I’ve learned something else, too: Facebook can’t be trusted to handle this kind of situation properly. Anybody could end up in my situation. Those of you with unusual (real) names, or unusual-looking pseudonyms, or who use fake names on Facebook (and I know that there are at least a dozen of you on my friends list)… or just those of you whose name looks a little bit off to a Facebook employee… you’re all at risk of this kind of lockout.

Me? I was a little pissed off, but it wasn’t the end of the world. But I know people who use Facebook’s “single sign-on” authentication systems to log in to other services. I know people who do some or all of their business through Facebook. Increasingly, I’ve seen people store their telephone or email address books primarily on Facebook. What do you do when you lose access to this and can’t get it back? When there’s nowhere to appeal?

And that’s how I came to my third lesson: I can’t rely on Facebook not to make this kind of fuck-up again. No explanation was given as to how their “mistake” was made, so I can’t trust that whatever human or automated system was at fault won’t just do the same damn dumb thing tomorrow to me or to somebody I know. And personally, I don’t like Facebook to seize control of my account and to pretend to be me. I come full circle to my first realisation – that it would be better not to have a Facebook account at all than to have one that I can’t access – and realise that because that’s liable to happen again at any time, that I shouldn’t have a Facebook account.

The Conclusion

So, I’m ditching Facebook.

None of this pansy “deactivation” shit, either – do you know what that actually does, by the way? It just hides your wall and stops new people from friending you: it still keeps all of your information, because it’s basically a scam to try to keep your data while making you think you’ve left. No, I’m talking about the real “permanent deletion” deal.

I’m going to hang around for a few days to make sure I’ve harvested everybody’s email addresses and pushing this post to my wall and whatnot, and then I’m gone.

If you’re among those folks who aren’t sure how to function outside of Facebook, but still want to keep in touch with me, here’s what you need to know:

I like email! Remember email? I’ve always preferred it to Facebook messages anyway – that’s why I always reply to you by email, where possible. My email address is pretty obvious – it’s my first name @ this domain name – but if that’s too hard for you, just fill in this form to get in touch with me. If you’re up for some security while you’re at it, why not encrypt your email to me.

I like instant messaging! I may not be on Facebook Messenger any more, but we can still chat! The best way to get me is on Google Talk, but there are plenty of other options too. Here’s how you do it. Or if you’re really lazy, just check at the top of my blog for the little green light and click “Chat to Dan”.

I like blogging! Want to know what’s going on in my life? I never updated my “wall” anyway except to link to blog posts – you might as well just come look at my blog! Too much like work? Follow my RSS feed and get updated when I post to my blog, or keep an eye on my Twitter, which usually gets links to my new blog posts almost as soon as they go up.

I like sharing! I’m not on Google Reader any more, but when I find fun things on the Internet that I enjoyed reading, I put them in this RSS feed. Subscribe and see what I’ve been looking at online, or just look at “Dan is Reading…” in the right-hand column of my blog.

And I’m not opposed to social networking! I’ve just reached the end of my patience with Facebook, that’s all. Look me up on Google+ and I’ll see you over there (They also have a “Real Names” policy, which is still a bit of a problem, but I’m sending them a pre-emptive “Don’t ban me, bro!” email now)!

Ironically, the only Facebook accounts I’ll have now are the once which do have fake names. Funny how they’re the ones that never seem to get banned.

Banned From Facebook

Apparently I’m too cool for Facebook.

Okay, that’s not what that message actually says, but that’s how I chose to read it. It turns out that my name isn’t real. I went through their forms to tell them that “no, really, this is my name”. They also asked me “what I use Facebook for”, to which I – of course – answered “chatting to friends and stalking exes, same as everybody else – why, what do YOU use Facebook for?” But when I submitted the form, it just ran me back around in a circle back to where I started.

Also: Facebook! Is that exposed HTML code in your message? Dear me.

I’d be less frustrated if I didn’t just send them a copy of my driving license earlier this year, in order to prove that my name was really my name. I guess that the media claims that Facebook keeps all of your information indefinitely aren’t true, and in actual fact they have the memory of a proverbial goldfish.

I’d be more frustrated if I actually used Facebook for anything more than pushing blog posts out to people who prefer to see them on Facebook, and occasionally chatting to people, thanks to the wonderful pidgin-facebookchat plugin.

So on average, I suppose, I’m pretty indifferent. That’s the Facebook way.

My Name Is Me

My Name Is Me. I choose to participate on much of the Internet by my full name. I say “full name”, rather than “real name”, because the term “real name” is full of loaded connotations. For example, I (still) periodically have people insist that Dan Q isn’t my real name, because it’s not the name I was born with. It doesn’t matter to them that it’s the name I’m known by to pretty much everybody (except my mother, who still calls me Daniel). It doesn’t matter that it’s the name on my passport or driving license. To them, it’s not “real” because to them, real names are either those acquired by birth or marriage, and somehow nothing else is valid. And that’s without even looking at the number of times I’ve been discriminated against because my name is “too short” for ill-designed computer systems.

That doesn’t bother me. What does bother me is that sites like Facebook and – in the news recently on this very topic – Google+ demand that full “real” names are used on the profiles of their site users. If you don’t use the name that appears on your government-issued documentation (if you have such a thing), then your accounts on these sites are liable to be closed. By the way: the same is theoretically true of your Google Profile, too, so even if you’re not on the Google+ bandwagon and you, say, use a nickname in your Google Profile, your account is still at risk.

Now, I can see the point that these policies are trying to make. In fact, there was a time that I’d have naively agreed with them. They’re trying to make the Internet a safer, more-accountable place. But in actual fact, there’s a real risk that they’ll make the Internet a lot more-treacherous for some people. I shan’t bother listing folks who are affected, because others have done it far more-thoroughly than I ever could.

But I shall point you in the direction of my.nameis.me, where you can read a little more about these issues. Thanks.

Deliciously Silly Password Restrictions

After hearing about the recent purchase of social bookmarking service del.icio.us by Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, I remembered that once, long ago, I had a del.icio.us account. I decided to check if my account was still alive, so I trekked over to del.icio.us and took a look.

The site’s changed quite a bit since I last used it. It took a while for me to remember what my password was (it was an old, old one, since before I started using passwords the right way). It also appeared that the site still knew me by my former name (it really had been a while since I last logged in!), so I updated it with my new name.

The next step was to change the password. I generated a random password:

#AOOZ*Qs9xsj6^bT@MtN4rq1!0FK&2

But when I went to change my password, it was rejected. Apparently it didn’t meet their security rules. What? That 30-character, randomly-generated password, containing uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers, punctuation, and special characters… isn’t secure enough?

A little investigation (and some experimentation) later, it turns out there’s a reason: my password must be insecure, because it contains my surname!

I have a single-character surname. That means that a 30-character password will (assuming a dictionary of 26 letters, 10 digits, and let’s say 20 special characters) have about a 40% chance of being rejected on the grounds that it contains my surname. The longer my password is, the more likely it is to be rejected as insecure. My experiments show that “abcdefghijklmnop” is considered by delicious to be more secure for my account password than, say, “@Ubj#JeqPACrgmSQKn9qRYMBM9nPOj”, on account of the fact that the latter contains my surname.

Silly, silly, silly.

After delicious finally died a death, I retroactively imported all my delicious bookmarks into this blog.

Disapora Invites

If anybody’s interested, I’m lugging around a sackload of Diaspora Alpha invitations. If you’re the kind of person who’s likely to want one, then you’re probably the kind of person who already knows what Diaspora is, so I shan’t go in to any further detail here.

Leave a comment if you want one, being sure to fill in the “Email” field of the comment form with the email address you’d like your invitation sent to. See you on the flipside.

Facebook Annoyance Of The Day

(rambling, ranty; I saw something on Facebook that pissed me off, and ended up ranting about the whole social media scene – no offence meant, and I’ve deliberately picked no examples from anybody I know or care about)

It’s not as bad as setting up a Facebook group to recover your friends’ mobile numbers after losing your phone, which I’ve complained about previously, but there’s a particular bit of behaviour that I’ve seen a few times on Facebook that really pisses me off.

Yes, in a world of geeks complaining about Facebook, I’m the geek who complains about Facebook users.

Here’s what I’m talking about:

Let’s have a look what’s happened here. Person 1 wants Person 2 to do them a favour: a little household chore: putting something in the post for them. So they went to Facebook, logged in, went to Person 2’s wall, and wrote about it there. What?

I’ve put together a quick list of other possible ways that Person 1 could have passed on this message:

Facebook Message – If you really were logged in to Facebook already, and even you were already on the page of the person you wanted to send a message to, it would only have been one more click to send a Facebook Message. This would have given you more options, in case you needed them, and would have meant that you didn’t have to tell every single one of Person 2’s friends about the mindless dull minutiae of an event that matters to (at most) only two people.
E-mail – Remember that? It’s fast, it’s simple, and it doesn’t involve filling your friend’s friends’ news feed with crap that has no relevance to them (or, in fact, to anybody).
Text message – There’s almost nobody left without a mobile phone, and I’d hope that you had your (presumably) housemate’s number: why not drop them a text. It’s typically even faster than the previous two suggestions, and you don’t even have to open a web browser. Hell; if you’re going to go that far, why not make a phone call (we can still do that, you know, even on modern mobiles).

I suppose that this mini-rant is actually a roundabout way of answering a question I get asked from time to time: Why can’t I post to your Facebook wall? I get asked this question about once every three or for months, and the answer is related to my complaints about the poster, above. Not being able to write on my wall isn’t part of the half-dozen or so layers of privilege I group my Facebook contacts into: writing on my “wall” is deliberately something that only I can do, no matter who you are.

And that’s because I don’t see the point. Why do I want a medium to which my friends can post messages specifically to me in full view of the rest of the world? I can fully understand why you’d want to write on your own wall – hey, it’s not that dissimilar to blogging – but what possible motive can you have to want to say something to me “in front of everyone”, except if perhaps it’s more important to you to be seen to be saying something than it is for me to hear your message?

If you have something to tell me, then tell me: call me, text me, instant message me (I’m on basically all of the networks), e-mail me (encrypted, if you prefer), or even fill in the form on my web site: I’m a really easy to get in contact with. If you have something to tell the world, or all of your friends, then put it on a blog, Tweet it, put it on your Facebook wall, or something. I can’t see any legitimate use case that I care about where you’d want to leave a message specifically for all of my friends.

I suppose while I’m full of rantyness I ought to explain my stance on Twitter, too. I had a Twitter account, once. I get it; I see the point. Microblogging; yeah, that’s a clever idea: sharing clever snippets of information, URLs, and whatnot without the hassle of having to type in your blog address and put it there. It’s not much hassle, but you sometimes feel a little like a cheater when you write a blog post of only a couple of sentences (but that hasn’t stopped me doing it from time to time). So I signed up for Twitter, found my friends and followed them, and gave it a go.

I read what my friends wrote, and I wrote about what was of interest to me.

Maybe it’s just my friends, or maybe it’s just that blogging works because it takes effort, but most of the tweets I would see fell into only a couple of categories. The first category are those tweets which are actually interesting, and are incredibly rare. The next category is those tweets which are half of a conversation about which I don’t care – a friend of mine talking to somebody I don’t know about something that doesn’t matter to me: you know, the thing I really hate about the way that people use their friends’ Facebook walls. The third category, and the most numerous for some of the people I followed, is tweets that surely have no value or interest to anybody at all. I don’t care that your bus is running late or that your boss has a new haircut. Why are you telling me this!

Perhaps I’m being a little unfair. Some of my friends produce consistently clever and interesting stuff on their Twitter feeds. Although these also tend to be the same people who write interesting things on their blogs, or who talk to me regularly, or who share fun stuff with me on Google Reader, and who generally otherwise keep me posted with what’s cool and interesting in their lives.

I’ve heard people say to me that my complaints about Twitter are invalid because I use Facebook (thereby carrying the implication that it’s just as bad). And it is just as bad – about 50% of the folks I know on Facebook type such drivel into their “walls” that I just don’t read them. But the difference is that I don’t have to. I can still use the useful Facebook features (contact details sharing, photo sharing, stalking) without having to get into the shitty “what my cat ate for dinner” stuff that seems to be the entirety of what the Twitter experience is about.

Me; I like blogs. A well-written blog post (with a sensible title: I’m looking at you, LiveJournalers) is something that I can read now, or later, or skip. Skipping tweets isn’t the same experience at all, because you’ll soon find yourself at “Oh no! That made the cat throw up!” and wonder what you missed (hint: fuck all). So I think I’ll stick to reading folks’ blog posts, logging into Facebook every couple of weeks, and checking a handful of my friends’ Twitter feeds once in a blue moon. Is that how it’s supposed to be done? I’m not sure, but it’s the only way that I’ve found that works for me.

Or perhaps I’m missing something.

40 Days On Facebook

I’ve been playing with Facebook for the last 40 days or so, to see if it’s any good. Here’s some of the things I’ve observed that I like (and don’t like) about it, followed by my conclusions:

Observations

In no particular order.

Nice. It’s a good platform for keeping up-to-date with your friends for the “littler things” that don’t really warrant blog entries, for helping you remember your friends’ contact details, birthdays, etc., for quickly sharing photos without too much hoo-hah, and so on.
Nice. It imports XML feeds, so you can integrate your Facebook presence with your blog or whatever else.
Nasty. It doesn’t export XML feeds! What is this, the middle ages? There’s a slight risk that some users may begin to use Facebook “notes” as substitute for blogging, and I and others who depend on RSS/Atom will end up not reading what they write as a result of it, but the notes system is pretty simplistic (as it should be) so it’s not terribly likely, at least for the time being.
Nasty. Searching for people is a little clunky: it could at least allow me to filter by country, or intelligently suggest people from my own country before showing me people in other countries.
Nice. Easy bulk-addition of friends from your address book. I’m an untrusting bugger, so I wouldn’t give them my webmail passwords (but I know others who have), but the CSV import tool, combined with a little scripting, quickly achieved very similar results, plus more.
Nice. Unlike many other social networking sites (and particularly the ridiculously bad myspace), it doesn’t allow arbitrary HTML to be splattered all over your profile page, so at least the user interface stays consistent and you’re not horribly vulnerable to cross-site scripting attacks every time you use it.
Nice. Good reciprocal “friends” system (including a wealth of FOAF-like “how do you know this person” links that make for interesting exploring when you start looking through your circle of friends) and well-designed privacy options so user have a great deal of control over who sees what.
Nasty. On the other hand, some people still seem to treat it like myspace: trying to join the most groups, have the most friends, or whatever, as if it were some kind of popularity contest. This probably also extends to people with silly names. Thankfully, they’re pretty few and far between, and – at least in my experience – they don’t harass you with endless messages a-la myspace.
Nice. The ads (it’s mostly an ad-supported service) are sparse and discreet. No big flashing animGIFs, flash, or banners.
Nasty. I can see why they’ve done the “networks” thing, but it can get on your tits until you get the hang of it. Why can’t I be in an alumni network for Aberystwyth? Because I didn’t have a Facebook account when I was at Aberystwyth, apparently. Why couldn’t Matt join the original Troma Night group? Because it, like me, was in the Wales regional network (because I hadn’t specified otherwise when I created it, and he’s not in Wales, is he!).

Conclusions

It’s a nice little social networking platform. It suffers from a lack of subscribable output feeds, a very slight “myspace factor” amongst some of it’s users, and weak search tools. However, it does a remarkably good job of providing a secure environment in which to publish your up-to-date contact and other personal information to your friends, share photos, pass simple messages around, arrange events, and discover the links within your friendship groups. I’ve heard good things said about using it instead of Friends Reunited and similar services, for getting in touch with old friends, but I’m not interested in that – I just like to be able to keep in touch more easily with the friends I have.

I’m making the Facebook team aware of these comments (and gripes) and hopefully it’ll become even better. In the meantime: if you haven’t tried it, I’d recommend giving it a go: they’ve got a nice, ethical account closure policy if you decide it’s not for you. A 40-day test drive had me… not hooked like some people, but… contented and impressed nonetheless: something I genuinely didn’t expect.