It turns out this is a “social plugin” from Facebook embedded in an iframe. As a (mostly former) web developer, I know that means CNN.com doesn’t actually know who I am; rather, that content is hosted on Facebook but embedded on CNN’s website in a way that CNN can’t access. But it’s ridiculous that I have to look at the source of a website and understand the DOM security model to know that. People see their friends’ activity on CNN.com and think the website knows who they are, and there’s no Facebook preference to turn that off.

Just to reiterate that, Facebook wants websites to embed iframes that can look just like their surroundings on the page and trick the user into thinking that website knows them and their friends, and didn’t bother including a way to turn that off. Maybe this iframe thing will catch on and my bank will start letting me log in from other websites too!

I considered these things and tried to think of any benefit of the Facebook service that came to close to outweighing its clear violation of my privacy. And then I deactivated my account. The answer was a definitive “no, I don’t even use the site that much anymore and don’t want to be involved if this is the direction they’re going”.

The first two days were rough; I had formed such a Facebook habit that I would go to click where my bookmark used to be and briefly hunt for it before remembering why it’s gone. But after that it got a lot easier, and today I didn’t really miss it or even think about it at all.

I’m not writing this post to try to convince anyone else to deactivate their accounts, though I know others who have for the same reasons. I understand that everyone values privacy differently (especially Facebook, apparently) and for some people the value provided really is worth the cost. I’m mainly writing it so that it’s public and I’ll be more likely to stick to my deactivation in case it gets more difficult to stay away. (ex-Facebook group therapy meetup, anyone?) Although, now that I’ve disabled third-party cookies in my browser, effectively turning off the “social plugins”, I might even consider reactivating my account down the road if they abandon this scary, scary direction they’re headed. But that seems pretty unlikely.

As the product manager of a website full of user-generated content, I try to keep up with what others solving some of the same problems are doing, and Facebook is certainly a leader in this space. That’s partly why I’m so disappointed that someone in a similar position made a conscious decision to make these new features opt-out and some parts not have an “off” switch at all. This is where I am reminded how awesome it is to work for a company that puts the user above everything else.

I guess Facebook and I will just have to agree to disagree on my privacy.

Last year I blogged that we were no longer actively developing or fixing bugs with the application behind Rock Your Firefox, a part of AMO’s codebase. Sadly, we’ll be ending support and disabling Rock Your Firefox this Friday. We may re-launch again in the future when we can rewrite the application to fix numerous bugs and make use of many new features on both AMO and the Facebook Platform.

As a way to remember the good times you had with Rock Your Firefox, make sure to grab a Rock Your Firefox Wallpaper before it’s too late.

to this:

You can add this to your userContent.css in Firefox to set it back to having a line break after the person’s name.

@-moz-document url-prefix(http://www.facebook.com/) {
    .commentable_item .comment_box .comment_content .comment_author {
        display: block !important;
    }
    .commentable_item .comment_box .comment_content .comment_actual_text {
        padding-left: 0 !important;
    }
}

That huge spike at the beginning of April is when Firefox 3 Beta 5 was released. The gaps in the graph are when the term wasn’t mentioned enough to be recorded. Comparing the results of other browsers isn’t too helpful as Safari and Opera are common nouns, and most people would abbreviate Internet Explorer as IE.

Although no actual numbers are given, it’s still cool to be able to visualize a part of the biggest way Firefox is adopted around the world: telling your friends about it.

• Over 7500 people have tried the application, with 4400 still using it and around 45 people interacting with it daily
• Average of 13-15 application adds every day although occasional spikes up to 35 per day, and about the same number of removes every day, although most of the removes are from people that added some time ago
• This chart shows the breakdown of how users found and added the application today.
• There were 12 application adds this week from someone accepting an invitation to RYF sent by a friend
• The application “About Page” has about 50 page views every day
• Over 24,000 favorites added, 8000 of which were added using the automatic import feature

So, what amazing features are planned now? None! The app doesn’t have any major bugs and does its job well for the number of users it serves. I don’t think there’s a need for me to continue active development, which is why that actually stopped a number of months ago. Of course, the app is open source and part of AMO’s codebase, so patches are welcome.

There are a couple other reasons I’m not too excited about working on Facebook Platform stuff anymore.

For one, while it’s pretty easy to get started developing an application for Facebook Platform, it’s now almost a full-time job trying to keep an application up to date utilizing all of the latest bugfixes and improvements, something that only companies dedicated to Facebook App development can handle. There are changes and new features constantly announced in the Platform Status Feed, Developer News Blog, and weekly push SVN commit log. Developers might also find themselves spending time in the platform Bugzilla, forum, or wiki. There are so many sources of information to follow if you want to feel like you’re on top of things.

There was a time when I complained about the lack of all of these tools (mainly the open bug tracking system), so I suppose I should be happy they’re here. Rock Your Firefox has been fortunate in that it hasn’t been broken by any of the changes so far — at least not any of the intentional changes.

Another reason I think putting RYF into maintenance mode a few months ago was the right decision is that Facebook apps seem to have gone from cool and trendy to just annoying lately. When someone sends me an application invitation these days, I just feel bothered. Especially because I’m obsessive enough that I have to immediately get rid of it. I’m one of those people that clears their Gmail spam every time they notice the number. (Note: to anyone who plans on sending me a bunch of application invitations now, I have anticipated this and determined that it will not be funny. Now you don’t have to do it!)

This is a bit longer than it was supposed to be. I’ll probably post another RYF update in 6 months or so. If you haven’t tried out Rock Your Firefox, you can check it out here.

While I’m sure it was quite expensive for this deal to take place, I guess we can expect similar items in the future. It will go nicely with the 2 sponsored polls in the last week I’ve had take up significant real estate in my newsfeed asking whether I would like to purchase a book on how to seduce women. (I’m guessing they are using polls to advertise because they can specify target audiences, unlike with flyers. Plus, people actually have to notice the polls.)

While advertisements creeping into Facebook’s core features is nothing new, as best I can tell at this late hour, this will be the first time they’ve allowed it to appear in users’ profile pages. (Obviously not including applications.) I hope next month they’ll introduce sponsored applications that are automatically added when you join Facebook, or better yet, interstitial ads.

Automatic Add-on Detection

When adding the application, users will now have the option to detect the add-ons they already have installed in Firefox and add them as favorites. Existing users can do this from the sidebar of the homepage. Anytime new add-ons are installed, you can re-scan to detect the changes.

New Homepage with Newsfeed

Instead of going directly to the Browse area when using the application, there is now a homepage with a list of recent add-on activity such as new versions of your favorite add-ons, favorite additions by your friends, and recommendations based on your friends’ favorites. The sidebar has several sections, some of which will not always be visible.

Check out version 0.4 at rockyourfirefox.com! The next release is planned for the end of September.

• Profile box visibility changes – This affected our default text shown before a user adds any favorites, but has already been fixed. Developers were previously told they had 10 days to adjust this, however that deadline has now been extended.
• Application Directory metrics shift to user engagement – I imagine this could only be better for us, as our statistics show that most of our users check back with the application every day. [Aside: We have fought with a similar problem on AMO of gaging popularity of add-ons based on raw download counts: People try to game the system to get into the top 5, which then gets them in for a long time as people will download anything in the top 5 without much consideration and then uninstall it. We will have new statistics to gage this by soon, including active user counts and "favorite" counts from both Facebook and AMO, which provide a much better idea of which add-ons people actually use and like.]
• Requests/Invitations deprecation – Rock Your Firefox does not allow users to send invitations to other users. A large part of that is because I expected this to happen. Application invitations are too spammy, and I didn’t think they would last long, especially with some applications abusing them by sending when the user didn’t even select friends to invite. Facebook stated that a standard tool for this will be offered, which is exciting, as we get the functionality but not the wasted time on development of the soon-to-be-deprecated system.
• No more e-mail notifications – Does not affect Rock Your Firefox.
• Newsfeed stories for everyone – As an application developer, this is very exciting. Currently, newsfeed stories generated by applications are only seen by friends that also have the application added. The only newsfeed story that has a chance of attracting new users is the generic “Foxkeh has added the Rock Your Firefox application.” If all stories have a chance of being seen, we can generate a lot more interest from users that don’t know about add-ons or don’t even know about Firefox. As a Facebook user, I really hope they have good controls so that if I don’t want to constantly see someone superfeeding their pet gift that grows into a map of places you’ve been, I don’t have to.
• Join Facebook with an application already added – Earlier this month, Facebook posted that they are working on a feature to allow users to sign up and immediately start using an application. As we have been promoting the rockyourfirefox.com URL and I suspect that several community members joined Facebook just to see the application, this will be helpful.

Overall, these changes are great for us, but I’m sure they are quite unfortunate for other applications that use functionality that will now be removed. Rock Your Firefox 0.4 is scheduled to release this Friday with two awesome new features, which I’ll blog about once they’re live.

I’m not one to get into the politics of whether Facebook Platform is good for the web. I’m more interested in what we can do to have people as excited about Firefox add-ons as they are about getting that one person who always takes forever in Scrabulous to finally go.

What can we learn from Facebook Platform? Why do people so readily add applications?

• Applications are restricted. People know exactly what an application is allowed to do within Facebook because you see a list of checkboxes when you add it. It can’t cause data loss. It can’t modify your information. Extensions can do anything they want. They can cause data loss. They can do bad things to your computer. I think that Firefox users who have never tried extensions are either: a) confused about what extensions are, or b) concerned about their security
• Applications are required to view content. If someone sends you something in an application, you often have to add that application to see it. In Firefox, we call those plug-ins. I can’t think of any extensions that you have to add in order to see content you find scattered around the web.
• You know when friends add applications. People add applications when they see something cool that a friend added. With Firefox add-ons, you don’t know what add-ons your friends use unless you use their browser or they talk about their extensions. (Although many of my friends talk about what extensions they use, I think it is fair to say this is not the norm.) This is what Rock Your Firefox tries to solve: seeing what add-ons your friends use and improving discoverability.

Having said that, I’m not saying that we should make any changes to be more like Facebook. I certainly think that extensions’ ability to modify anything is key to the innovation that we see all the time in new extensions. I think we need to find out what facets of the Firefox ecosystem are the most compelling and make people realize that everything that’s being done on Facebook could be done even better in the open web.

(Obligatory disclaimer: The above opinions are my own and are not affiliated with any entity in which I may be involved.)

• Globally: #2052
• My friends: #1
• LSU: #7 (of 43,149 people (I’m actually tied for third place but they count strangely))
• Baton Rouge, LA: #1 (of 17,334 people)

I got the Final Four all correct, so hopefully UCLA and Georgetown will make it to the championship and I’ll be even more correct. Pretty good for not knowing anything about basketball.