Score one for the users. Facebook changed their terms of service back to the pre-February-4th version.

Thanks to everyone who visited and participated in the discussion. It’s been quite a few days!

Yoink!

As I’ve become embroiled in the hulaballoo over Facebook’s Terms of Service changes on Sunday, there have been many discussions on Facebook (and off) concerning the concept of ownership.

Ownership, in the legal sense, related to “rights” over content. (Or Intellectual Property, in this case.) Photos, Images, Drawings, Music, anything you type into a web browser and submit.

» Continue reading “Facebook TOS “takes away” your ownership rights”

I recently updated to Firefox 3.0.6, and even prior to this I noticed a message box appeared every time a new window opened:

This may take several hours, actually.

I’m not a big fan of this whole waiting thing, especially » Continue reading “Upgrading … This may take a few minutes. (Firefox)”

Damage Control

Mark Zuckerberg defended the recent change to Facebook’s TOS in a blog post recently. As much as I appreciate any response from Facebook regarding their lecherous move, his rebuttal has no merit whatsoever. As a co-founder of my own startup in the 90s (unfortunately, never anything close to the scale of the 500-lb gorilla that is Facebook), this post is simply damage control.
» Continue reading “Technical rebuttal of Mark Zuckerberg’s rebuttal to Facebook TOS change”

Facebook pulled a "Columbia House" on us

Well, as I’ve said in the past, you can’t expect to use free services and have any semblance of privacy.

Facebook updated their Terms of Service (TOS) yesterday and slipped in a little “extra” clause which » Continue reading “Facebook’s new TOS: We have rights to everything posted here, forever. Sorry!”

There was a short period in the late 90s and early 00s when I would use “disposable” email addresses for everything. I had “catch-all” email addresses such as anything@example.com which I would when signing up for a site where I was unsure of their email practices. If I signed up on “this-domain.com” my email would be “this-domain.com@example.com” and I could track which services were selling my email without my knowledge or not.

The concept here is if the vendor started to spam me, or sold my name, I could block » Continue reading “Ongoing list of bad email practice providers”

The X and the "up" icon added recently to Google results

I noticed in the past two or so months, after Google upgraded their SERPs to enable users to rearrange and delete results (see thumbnail to right) that the outbound links Google was posting on SERPs were redirects through the google.com site (meaning, they were tracking clicks on outbound links.)

Since I often search for something on Google, then “right-click”, “Copy” to get a link, I noted the links were not the actual links, but Google.com links. This went away shortly thereafter.

Today, checking again, they are using JavaScript to track outbound links (View Source on a SERP and examine the outbound links).

For example, one of our » Continue reading “Analysis of Google outbound link tracking”

Remember when all these terms meant consumer products?

Well, according to Clicky, Smackdown and a discussion forum on Webmaster World, many webmasters are fearful of AJAX-only search from Google.

As I wrote in a recent article on Helium (a low-traffic one, at that), Google is a near-monopoly, and user Shaddows here points out that opting out of Google’s index (say, in protest) is commercial suicide, and I humbly agree.

For SEO, this obviously bodes not well. » Continue reading “Uh-oh. AJAX-powered search kills keywords in referrers”

Unfortunately, this tax deduction barely covers diapers

Last year, I did some work for a local 501.3c organization who I believed was doing some great things here in Media, PA.

It was for the First Fair Trade Town in the USA, and it was for their web site development.

I had done a lot of work on the first version of the web site, met with a lot of their staff, and developed » Continue reading “In-kind donations and tax deductions”

I write web applications for a living. I enjoy it immensely.

Webkit-based browsers (FireFox, Mozilla, Chrome, and Safari) are a pleasure to work with – they render closely to what you design with stylesheets, their JavaScript engines perform quickly and what you’d expect, and the final rendering of sites is generally pleasing.

Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) and Internet Explorer 7 (IE7), however, are slime mold. » Continue reading “Disappearing content in MSIE7 using AJAX”