Facebook Using Your Photos for Ads: I Told You So

July 19, 2009 by 5 Comments

Earlier this year, I wrote several posts about Facebook’s crappy terms of service (specifically the portion of their terms related to photo licensing). Shortly after I blogged about it, Facebook’s terms made national news and there was quite a bit of discussion.

Amongst those who thought I was making a big deal out of nothing, one of the consistent themes was that although the terms of service allowed for Facebook to use your photos for any purposes including advertising, they wouldn’t really do that, would they?

When I gave a talk at Ignite Portland surrounding this topic, I commented that people probably wouldn’t want their photos to be used for a dating service (in the video of my talk below, I make that comment if you start watching at 4:40). Guess what: Facebook is now doing just that. You can opt out, but the default setting on Facebook allows them to use your photos as advertisements to meet “Hot Singles in Your Area”. Lovely.

Ignite Portland 5 – Aaron Hockley – About terms & conditions from David Abramowski on Vimeo.

Filed Under: General Info, Rants, Social Media · Tagged With: , , ,

Posterous vs. WordPress

July 13, 2009 by 9 Comments

As most of you probably know, I’m a big fan of WordPress, what with being the lead organizer for WordCamp Portland and having founded the Portland WordPress User Group and all. That said, Posterous has been making a lot of waves lately with Steve Rubel now using it for all of his publishing and even Chris Brogan giving it a shot. I decided to use Posterous to blog our recent roadtrip, publishing text and photos from the road.

The big differentiator between Posterous and a traditional blog platform like WordPress is that all content is published via email. Sending text to Posterous creates a text post. Including a photo or video attachment results in those being shown on the post. If multiple photos are attached, a gallery is created. Posterous’ other notable feature is that it can then notify other social networks of your content. Photos can be sent to Flickr or Facebook. Links to the Posterous post can be published to Twitter or a Facebook news feed. Videos can be sent to YouTube, Vimeo, or the like.

My overall impression was that post-by-email was a great solution for moblogging from a smartphone, but the limitations of the service mean that I wouldn’t consider it for any sort of permanent blog/web presence. The look/feel can’t be customized, and my of the “nice to haves” of a full blog platform (Gravatar, OpenID support, threaded comments, etc.) are missing. I know that Posterous is under development and I’d expect to see these type of features in the future, but for now I don’t think it can be seen as anything more than a plumbing system to mass-publish content across the web.

As such a plumbing system, it works great. I had no problems using their email interface to specify if I wanted my content to go everywhere (in my case Posterous, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook) or just to a subset of the services. One gotcha that I ran into was that because I have my Facebook feed setup to import from Flickr, when I posted a photo to both Flickr and Facebook it showed up twice on Facebook. This isn’t a fault of Posterous at all, but rather me needing to be more granular in my cross posting. The one Posterous-to-Facebook annoyance that is a limitation is that when posts are made with photos on Posterous, the photos get put into a Facebook album and the blog post gets pushed to the Facebook news feed, but there’s no connection.

Overall Posterous worked great for pushing a variety of content to a variety of places. The rather spartan web interface, lack of customization, and lack of extensibility limits its usefulness for a more traditional blog or website presence. A lot of Posterous’ functionality could be duplicated via WordPress plugins. For a simple publishing mechanism, Posterous is great, but for a full-featured blog platform, WordPress remains king.

Filed Under: Blogging, Social Media, Technology · Tagged With: , ,

Awesome Friends that Appreciate Railfans

July 11, 2009 by 1 Comment

On a much happier note than the Spearfish Travelodge review that I just posted, while I was on vacation I missed an opportunity to ride TriMet’s MAX light rail trains on a test run down the recently-reopened transit mall in downtown Portland. Fortunately my friends made sure I was there in some form:

Photos posted to Flickr by Igal Koshevoy; I’m not sure who the photographer was.

Filed Under: General Info, Humor, Portland/Vancouver · Tagged With: , , , , ,

Spearfish Travelodge Review – Never Again

July 11, 2009 by 2 Comments

I offer this review of a recent trip to Spearfish, South Dakota, where we stayed at the Travelodge. I cannot recommend this motel to others; what follows is a recap of our experiences.

Background: we stayed six nights (Saturday through Thursday nights) in early July 2009.

Spearfish Travelodge Problems, roughly in chronological order:

  • Swimming Pool: The swimming pool was in the midst of demolition and reconstruction, despite their assurances two months prior that it would be available by the time we arrived. To their credit, they offered to reimburse admission to the local rec center’s swimming facility / water park.
  • Wifi: For the first four nights, the wifi could be described as “intermittent” at best. Quite often we’d connect to the local network (get a 169.254.x.x address) but would be unable to route to the internet. On the fifth night, we were never able to connect at all, even after having the management reboot their router a couple times.
  • Breakfast: The hotel’s breakfast offerings were weak, consisting only of coffee, juice, and bread products (toast, cereal, waffles). Noticeably missing was any sort of fresh fruit.
  • Housekeeping: The day after we arrived, housekeeping did not make up our room until some point after 16:45. They were a little earlier on subsequent days but I believe it was always after noon. Given there were four of us, we had four sets of bath linens (towels, washcloths, etc). One day, they took away the four dirty sets of linens and only left two sets as replacement.
  • Maintenance: On the fifth evening, the glass cover (approx 12″ in diameter) dropped off of the main ceiling light in our bedroom. Fortunately it didn’t break when it hit the floor and nobody was standing under it. We also noticed mildew in the bathroom.
  • Attitude: Compounding the various physical problems, the staff’s attitude didn’t help. They kept pointing at my computer as the wifi problem before finally admitting on the last night that it was an issue with our room’s location. When we checked out, I had to argue to get a receipt. WTF?

I wasn’t expecting W quality at the Travelodge, but the wifi failure and general state of disrepair was disturbing. Spearfish has quite a few motels and hotels; I’d highly recommend that folks look elsewhere if they want decent accommodations.

Filed Under: General Info · Tagged With: , , , ,
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