Facebook’s Terms: My Original Complaints Remain

February 18, 2009 by 3 Comments

I see that Zuckerberg and crew did a 180 and reverted the “forever” clause in Facebook’s terms of service. It’s a small step in the right direction, but all of my original objections to Facebook’s terms (the objections that led to me deleting my account) remain. Facebook’s licensing terms are still too broad and claim far more rights than is necessary.

I’ll be speaking tomorrow night at Ignite Portland about social networks, media hosting, and licensing terms.

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

Don’t Move Important Buttons: Twhirl’s Bad Update

February 9, 2009 by Leave a Comment

I just updated to version 0.9 of Twhirl, my Twitter client of choice. The new version has some great new features including saved searches. Unfortunately there’s a small button change with annoying implications.

Twhirl Trash Button Moved

In previous versions, the “trash” button was on the far right (green circle). My normal method was to clear the tweets using this icon as I read, so that if I wanted to catch up on what I missed I’d know how far back to go. With the new version, the trash icon was moved to the left (red circle). On the right? The refresh button. Now, instead of trashing, my habitual mouse move to that location does a refresh which a) doesn’t clear the window and b) makes another hit to Twitter’s limited API.

I’m cranky. I’m using up API calls and momentarily wondering why hitting the button (which has always been in the same place) isn’t clearing the window. How is this an upgrade?

Filed Under: Rants, Social Media, Software Dev · Tagged With: , , , ,

ReadWriteWeb, Movable Type, and Vidoop OpenID: Broken

February 4, 2009 by 8 Comments

Warning: user-focused “I just want this damn thing to work” rant ahead.

It’s no secret that I’m a big proponent of OpenID. Last year I took a stand that I would avoid participation on tech-focused blogs that didn’t support OpenID. Shortly thereafter, I discovered that I couldn’t sign into ReadWriteWeb using my Vidoop OpenID.

I contacted Vidoop, and was told:

I’ve done some more troubleshooting with our friends at ReadWriteWeb, the issue is that they aren’t configured to handle “https” (SSL) connections, and we don’t allow OpenID associations with websites who don’t use SSL to verify with us.

This makes sense to me. The main reason I use Vidoop is because of their excellent security and the fact they require a SSL connection is a good thing. I then contacted Richard at ReadWriteWeb; he bounced the issue to his Movable Type consultant, who responded with this:

I have forwarded this on to Byrne at Six Apart. This seems like something that should be supported natively by MT’s OpenID auth module. I will share any feedback that comes back from 6A.

That was in March 2008. It’s now February 2009, and I’m still receiving “An error occurred: The sign-in attempt was not successful; please try again.” when attempting to log in to what should be an easy authentication system for end users.

Why is this so hard? What’s going on?

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

4 Tech Blogs that are OpenID FAIL (and 1 that isn’t)

April 30, 2008 by 2 Comments

After last week’s post about taking a stand for OpenID, Kelly Guimont suggested a list of offenders; that is, tech blogs that don’t walk the OpenID walk. Here are four big tech blogs that fail, as well as one that’s doing things right:

  • TechCrunch – no OpenID support. I sent a note to @TechCrunch on Twitter and didn’t receive a response.
  • Web Worker Daily – no OpenID support. I asked a question (appropriately enough in a post about OpenID) and received this answer:

    Aaron, thanks for the suggestion. WWD is hosted by WordPress.com so we don’t the same flexibility when it comes to installing plug-ins meant for self-hosted blogs.

    It’s a valid response from a technical standpoint, but I have to wonder if a site that’s all about forward-looking web productivity should be tied to an architecture they can’t extend to support developing standards.

  • Read/Write Web – These guys get partial credit. They have OpenID support, but it fails if your provider uses a secure (SSL) connection (such as Vidoop). I have had a dialog with Richard, and they are looking into it via the folks at SixApart since they’re running Movable Type. My last contact with them was a month ago, and it still appears not to be working.
  • Mashable – I asked about OpenID support and Pete responded on Twitter with:

    it’s on the todo list. but, the todo list is very long :(

Enough of the big tech blogs that fail… who’s doing it right? Last week I sent Scott Hanselman a note about OpenID support on his blog, knowing that he was one of the contributors to DasBlog, an open source .NET blog platform. Yesterday he announced OpenID support, and he featured the OpenID work as his Weekly Source Code post for this week.

Kudos to Scott. It’s a shame that the big blogs who write about new technologie seem slow to embrace them.

* this post was originally posted yesterday, then lost last night as part of a blog explosion

[tags]openid, techcrunch, webworkerdaily, readwriteweb, mashable, scotthanselman, dasblog[/tags]

Filed Under: General Info, Rants ·
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