Elliott C. Back » Facebook

Facebook Virus – Suspicious Activity Log

Elliott Back — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 21:06:06 +0000

I think I’ve been hit by the latest lame Facebook virus-like application! It’s called suspicious activity log, and it’s designed to trick people into approving it by sending an official-looking message to as many friends as it can indicating that their “profiles have been reported as terms of service (tos) violations.” Here’s a screenie of the notification it posted to me:

I went to the application page, and this is what I got:

The Facebook “friend” who was stupid enough to install this piece of crap malware is no longer my Facebook “friend.” Fortunately, I’ve never met him in real life, so the pain to my heart is minimal!

Facebook Error Sending Messages

Elliott Back — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 05:12:11 +0000

I’ve been getting this error trying to send a message to friends on Facebook:

HTTP Error

Transport error (#302) while retrieving data from endpoint `/inbox/ajax/ajax.php’: Unknown HTTP error #302

Weird, I wonder what’s the problem.

New Facebook Design Preview

Elliott Back — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 23:52:03 +0000

If you hurry over to new.facebook.com you can see a Beta version of their new design (Pulse says they took it down, but they haven’t for me). It’s interesting, because while it’s definitely going in the right direction, it’s nowhere near complete or solid. It is unusual for a company to publicly “try out” their design work, but Facebook is the first of a new breed. Anyway, here’s my take on things, starting with the new “home page”, your wall:

The new wall page, the first page you see when logging in

The new “All Posts / Wall Posts / Posts by Me” filters are nice.
Only three posted items in the right bar? It should have at least 10.
Posted items have a thumbnail and text; without the text, they are mostly blank space.
There is a ton of blank space between the footer and chat bar!

The new info profile page, tells you about you

The edit information button renders wrong.
The “fan pages” have too much blank space with the vertical layout!

The photos page has the best layout

The photos page is perfect, the spacing is great. There’s little wasted space here!

Note also that on a wide monitor, there is just a huge amount of blank space to the sides of each page. Also, Mashable has their own “New Facebook” review; they conclude stuff isn’t “working as I’d expect.”

Social Networking Uptime

Elliott Back — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 02:19:00 +0000

My favorite blog in the world has a post about the year to date downtime of various social networks which is revealing. Not a single one achieves the famous “three nines” uptime SLA (although Amazon’s S3 service offers a two nines 99.99% uptime guarantee).

Yahoo 360 isn’t a real social network, but it had great uptime

The best of these is Yahoo 360, with 99.9938% uptime over the last two months, followed by Myspace (99.969%), Facebook (99.8822%), Linked In (99.7024%), and finally Windows Live (99.4482%). MySpace was only down for 25m, while MSN Live Spaces had an embarrassing 7hrs 25m of downtime.

Scrabulous Not Dead Yet

Elliott Back — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 01:11:56 +0000

Scrabulous, the popular Scrabble clone, was announced dead earlier today by Mashable. With over 600,000 daily users, it caught the eye of Hasbro and Mattel who sent a takedown notice to Facebook.

The only problem, Mashable, is that I have been playing it today. Basically, the story is completely false; if Facebook did get a takedown request, it would be wiped out completely and not throwing errors / playable.