Eye on Winer

Apparently two days is all it takes for Facebook to ferret-out highly publicized fake users and exterminate them from their network. My sources with Facebook accounts tell me that searches for “Newsjunk” and “John Newsjunk” are returning no results, while before they were returning one account with a picture of Teddy Roosevelt. More confirmation always welcome, facebookers.

What’s interesting is that this has yet to be mentioned on the NewsJunk Blog or Scripting News… both still prominently advertising the fake account.

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.”