This weekend I deactivated my Facebook account after six years of near-daily use. I was surprised that Facebook showed such disregard for their users’ privacy by making their new Instant Personalization features opt-out so soon after the Google Buzz backlash a few months ago and their own adventures with Beacon a couple years ago. My surprise turned to shock when, after I disabled these new features, I went to CNN.com and discovered it knew who I was.
posts tagged with “sadface”
On Surprises & Business Models
3 commentsA little over four years ago I created my first Firefox add-on. Things were different back then: there were only around 2,000 extensions (we didn’t call them add-ons), addons.mozilla.org was update.mozilla.org, and add-on developers always seemed to respect their users’ privacy and choices without the need for Mozilla to get involved in telling developers what they can and can’t do.
Times have changed, and last April, the add-ons team came up with a policy statement about respecting the choices a user has made, not changing defaults unless the user would expect that change, and not interfering with other add-ons. We hadn’t named the policy, so when it came time to blog about it, I read through it trying to think of a name that summarized our position. The result was the oft-cited “No Surprises” policy, now officially adopted after some slight modifications.
Frankly, I am still surprised on a weekly basis by the behavior of some add-ons and companies targeting add-ons. This recent flurry of issues we’re dealing with has left me wondering, “what’s so different between add-ons just a few years ago and now?” Money, of course.
ChromeExtensions.org: sincerely flattering
12 commentsAs a kid, I was pretty good at the comics where two pictures were placed side-by-side and you were tasked with figuring out the slight differences between them. I came across ChromeExtensions.org today, a website for Google Chrome browser extensions that isn’t officially connected with Google. I noticed quite a few similarities between this site and a site I’ve worked on for a few years, addons.mozilla.org. I really do take it as a compliment that they liked our site enough to copy so much of it, but in the interest of fun, I’ll try to identify as many coincidences as I can.
TechCrunch: enough with the Twitter posts
2 commentsI like Twitter. I really do. I like TechCrunch too, and have been subscribing to their posts for years now. But I can’t stand the barrage of Twitter-related posts over the last few months. I decided to take a look at how many posts per day over the last 3 months have been related to Twitter using this handy CrunchBase page. My findings are below:
There are many blogs out there that are dedicated to covering one service. They usually make that pretty clear in their name. But I think it’s ridiculous for TechCrunch to have 8 posts in a single day related to Twitter (as they did yesterday) and to have only 2-3 days per month where they DON’T talk about Twitter. Twitter being down is not news. Twitter disabling search for a few hours is not news.
I was satisfied just leaving a short comment to this effect on the latest Twitter post, but after doing the brief post count research above and realizing how long I’ve tolerated this for, I’m no longer a TechCrunch reader. If they ever reduce the number of Twitter posts or perhaps split the mind-numbing posts off into TweetCrunch, I’ll be glad to hit the subscribe button again.
And like I said: I actually like Twitter. It’s gotta suck even more for the people that don’t care for Twitter.
One Size Doesn’t Fit All
13 commentsToday I went to Internet Explorer’s website to “get the facts” on why I should upgrade my “old Firefox” to IE8, when I came across this gem on the MythBusting page:
Internet Explorer 8 has much more functionality than other browsers, and its functionality is there from the moment you open the browser. Internet Explorer 8 offers almost all of the features the most popular add-ons in Firefox have, and you’re able to personalize your browser in a way that saves you time and research.
As someone whose job is working with Firefox Add-ons every single day, you can imagine my shock when I learned that IE has almost all of the features of our top add-ons built right in! I did some research trying to figure out how this could have happened, and realized that, like much of the “Get the Facts” section, it is completely untrue.