Blog
23 January 2010
Recipe Binder for iPhone uses Facebook Connect to work with the Recipe Binder for Facebook application, which currently has 5,315 monthly active users and over 20,000 user-submitted recipes for Facebook users to browse, search, favourite, rate and comment on.
What I like best about using Recipe Binder over other recipe websites is that all the recipes have been “tried and tasted” by other friends and Facebook users. I’ve found some pretty good original recipes on there and I will honestly be adding more of my recipes now I know I can easily access them on my iPhone.
Recipe Binder for iPhone (iTunes App Store link) is available now and costs just $1.99 / £1.19.
Well done Chris and Dave!
Non-Disclaimer: This is just a quick plug for an iPhone app which a couple of mates have been working on. They haven't asked me to write this and I'm certainly not being paid to do so. In fact, I even had to buy my own copy...
Labels: facebook, food, iphone
12 June 2009
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2009-06-12-n15.html
Yesterday, Facebook suggested two people to me through its “Suggestions” feature which usually includes friends of friends, co-workers and people I used to go to school with. The odd thing about these two suggestions was that although I knew both of them – I had made contact with them years ago because they are my third or fourth cousins – we had no friends in common, we had never worked at the same place, we even lived in different parts of the world. So how did Facebook know that we knew each other?
I’m sure all you Facebook users are already aware that you can enter your Gmail (or other webmail) username and password to import a list of your contacts into Facebook to see if any of them are already registered based on their email address. This is something I have never done as I don’t like to enter my Google Account password on third-party websites. Even if I had done this, I knew for a fact that I had never used my Gmail account to email these two people.
But what if Facebook had used my friends’ imported contact lists to suggest their profile to me even though they didn’t add me as a friend? I am now pretty sure that’s what happened here. Here’s how I proved it:
My friend added my email address to his Contacts in Gmail.
My friend signed in to his Facebook account and imported his Contacts from his Gmail account using the “Find People You Email” feature.
My friend chose to skip the friend suggestion it was making based on my Gmail address.
I signed in to my Facebook account and saw that my friend’s Facebook account was being suggested to me.
In summary, it seems that even if you choose to skip the contacts you have imported, Facebook will still store your relationship with those contacts. Not only will it continue to include them in your suggestions, but it will also alert them to the fact that you previously imported their email address and that you are registered on Facebook. Facebook clearly states that it will not store your password, but it doesn’t tell you that it will store all your contacts even if you chose to skip them.
Admittedly, your account will only be suggested to others if your privacy settings allow your profile to be returned in search results, so anyone could search for your profile themselves, but is it right for Facebook to suggest you to the people that you have chosen to skip? Also, does this mean it’s possible to force yourself into someone else’s suggestions list by simply adding their email address to your contacts?
Update: Canna points out in the forum that you can now remove this information from Facebook using the Remove Contacts Imported using the Friend Finder page, usually accessible via: Friends > Find Friends > Learn More. (Perhaps this is a new page as I don’t remember seeing that link before...) [Thanks Canna!]
Labels: blogoscoped, facebook, google
25 March 2008
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-03-25-n14.html
By Tony Ruscoe & Philipp Lenssen
Private Facebook photos were exposed to the public through a simple URL edit, Associated Press and ReadWriteWeb report. The hole is now apparently closed. Similar cases have appeared before on other sites with photo hosting and sharing, like MySpace and SmugMug.
Furthermore, as we found out, with a little workaround anyone can see what we understand is intended to be an employee-only Google network. Once in that network, you can then also view e.g. photos and profiles which the Google employees have flagged to be seen only by members of that network, or read along the network’s discussions. (There are currently 8,529 members in the Google network.)
We alerted Facebook and Google security of this today (it’s somewhat hard to define which of the two companies is responsible for this security issue) and can reveal details once they had some time to fix it. Note the workaround may or may not be applicable to other networks; it depends on the network. The safest option until it’s fixed may be to temporarily leave private networks, or perhaps choose some other option to make a profile more private.
Labels: blogoscoped, facebook, google
24 July 2007
Things have been a bit slack on this blog recently. To be honest, I’d almost forgotten I even had a blog until I read this status update on Facebook around a week ago:
Christian is thinking that people should be updating their blogs rather than concentrating on Facebook.
For those who haven’t been reading my status updates on Facebook, here’s a summary of what I’ve been doing since my last post:
Sorry, Christian, I know that’s probably not what you meant, but it’ll have to do for now... ;-)
Labels: facebook, gadgets, golf, music, personal, tv, wii
14 June 2007
Things have been a bit quiet on this blog recently. That’s partly because five weeks ago I finally signed up to Facebook, which is currently the best way to spend all your spare time doing nothing on the Internet. (More accurately, I received an invite to join Facebook from a friend, but since I wanted to use a different email address than the one where I’d received the invite, I had to register an account and then search for the friend who’d sent the invite in the first place... but more on that later.)
Facebook always seems to get mixed reactions; people either love it and can’t get enough of it, hate it because they don’t see the point, or like the idea but find it useless because they don’t have any friends (either on Facebook or in reality). When Chris joined, he described it as being “Friends Reunited done well. Or Friends reunited with Twitter and Flickr added on. And with blogger.” Coco signed up and hated it at first, but soon changed his mind once he’d got a few more friends and found out it had an API. Now he loves it so much that he’s written a Recipe Binder application for Facebook. Generally speaking though, the people who ‘get’ it and use it properly quickly become addicted to it. And I know this because I’ve seen loads of people update their status to things like, “Chris is addicted to Facebook.”
So what’s so good about Facebook then?
Here are five things:
You can tag people in photos, enabling you to view all photos of your friends regardless of who took them. This makes it much more useful than Flickr when it comes to parties and group photos.
Not only can you leave comments for your friends on their walls, but you can use the Wall-to-Wall feature to view your conversation with them in chronological order. The lack of a feature like that on MySpace confused the hell out of me.
When you login, you see your News Feed which shows you what’s happening with all your friends, like who’s been writing on walls, which groups they’ve been joining, what their current status is, whether they’ve uploaded new photos. Again, MySpace had nothing like this. Checking all your friends’ profile pages for new stuff on MySpace is a right ball-ache.
They have a pretty decent mobile version of the site at m.facebook.com which lets you do most things, such as update your status, view profiles, write on walls and accept friend requests.
They recently released a development platform so that anyone can write applications for Facebook. That’s good for Facebook (because they don’t have to bother doing much new development), good for users (because they get loads of useful or otherwise interesting applications) and good for developers (because they get to show off their skills and stuff).
And what’s bad about it?
Here are another five things:
They’re sneaky bastards and ask you for your Gmail/Yahoo/Hotmail account password so that they can send invites to all your contacts. By making this part of the registration process, they’ve been hugely successful in spreading their Facebook love.
If someone sends an invite to an email address other than the one you’ve got registered with Facebook – or the one you want to register with Facebook if you’re a new user – you can’t accept the invitation. When you click the link, you don’t get the option to login. This means you either have to login and search your friend or start messing about with parameters in query strings. While Facebook does allow you to add multiple email addresses to your account, I still got an invite the other day asking me to register even though I’d added that email address, so I don’t know what’s going on there.
There’s no easy way to find out which people you’ve already sent friend requests. The closest you can get is the list of people who can view your profile on the Poke, Message and Friend Request Settings privacy page.
There’s no option to remain signed in on the main site. However, the mobile version does leave you signed in. I guess this is because it was originally aimed at schools and universities where most people would probably be using shared computers. They should at least make this an option now.
They recently released a Developer Platform so that anyone can write applications for Facebook. That’s bad for users because Facebook profiles will probably start to become overly cluttered and messy like most MySpace profiles, especially when some applications have a ‘viral invite system’ which essentially sends invites to all the friends of anyone who adds the application.
Of course, if I’m wrong about any of those points, let me know.
Facebook me!
Today’s blog post was brought to you by the number 5...
Labels: facebook, personal, rant
