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Winer, Mele Can’t Follow Rules

June 18th, 2008 by EyeOnWiner

Got an email from a sharp reader this afternoon, who pointed out the issue better than I could, so here it is:

Winer couldn’t figure out the Facebook API (probably because it’s not in XML-RPC or backed by Frontier), so to allow people to follow News Junk (which really is junk, I can’t imagine anyone wanting to follow it), he created a fake person:

http://newsjunk.wordpress.com/2008/06/18/how…

“It’s easy — we created a person for you to befriend, someone named John Newsjunk, who magically says exactly the same things that NewsJunk.com says through Twitter.”

Which is against the rules for Facebook (you have to be a real person). They made apps for exactly this reason, but Winer–king of give me an API dammit–refused to follow the rules. How many days before John Newsjunk gets deleted and Winer will go on a rampage?

Interestingly, Nicco Mele (Dave’s partner) seems to think this is a good idea:

We made it a person so that the status updates show up in your Newsfeed, like twitter. It was the easiest way to do that – I don’t think Fan pages talk to the Newsfeed like that and the API limits what you can do with an application. Individuals control the privacy settings and what shows up in the Newsfeed, but the defaults favor friends for inclusion in the Newsfeed. But if I’m wrong, let me know…! And thanks, we’ll make the profile public right now.

Which is a long way of saying “We didn’t like the rules, so we ignored them.”

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 at 5:59 pm and is filed under Dave, Facebook. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “Winer, Mele Can’t Follow Rules”

  1. Jon says:
    June 18, 2008 at 7:12 pm

    Since the rules weren’t called out, here are Facebook’s terms that apply:

    http://www.facebook.com/terms.php

    In addition, you agree not to use the Service or the Site to:

    • Register for more than one User account, register for a User account on behalf of an individual other than yourself, or register for a User account on behalf of any group or entity;
    • Use automated scripts to collect information from or otherwise interact with the Service or the Site;
    • Impersonate any person or entity, or falsely state or otherwise misrepresent yourself, your age or your affiliation with any person or entity;
  2. Morton Salt says:
    June 18, 2008 at 7:43 pm

    I am waiting for a “Facebook == Evil” post to match the “Google == Evil” post at http://scripting.com/misc/nicco.html.