Anita Rowland

Marc Orchant

Imose, Chikaora and Anyachiemeka Ogbuji 

Now playing: Wu-Tang Clan - The Heart Gently Weeps

The top story in my favorite aggregator today is the announcement on Scott Guthrie’s blog of the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions CTP Preview. Normally, announcements related to ASP.NET would not interest me except this time is an interesting item in the list of technologies being released

ADO.NET Data Services: In parallel with the ASP.NET Extensions release we will also be releasing the ADO.NET Entity Framework.  This provides a modeling framework that enables developers to define a conceptual model of a database schema that closely aligns to a real world view of the information.  We will also be shipping a new set of data services (codename "Astoria") that make it easy to expose REST based API endpoints from within your ASP.NET applications.

Wow. It looks like Astoria has quickly moved from being an experimental project to see what it would like to place RESTful interfaces on top of SQL Server database to being very close to shipping a production version.  I dug around for more posts about Astoria ADO.NET Data Services so I could find out what was in the CTP and came across two posts from Mike Flasko and Andy Conrad respectively.

In his post entitled ADO.NET Data Services ("Project Astoria") CTP is Released on the ADO.NET Data Services team blog Mike Flasko writes

The following features are in this CTP:

• Support to create ADO.NET Data Services backed by:
  • A relational database by leveraging the Entity Framework. 
  • Any data source (file, web service, custom store, application logic layer, etc)
• Serialization Formats:
• Industry standard AtomPub serialization
• JSON serialization
• Simple HTTP interface
  • Any platform with an HTTP stack can easily consume a data service
  • Designed to leverage HTTP semantics and infrastructure already deployed at large
• Client libraries:
  • .NET Framework
  • ASP.NET AJAX
  • Silverlight (coming soon)

This is sick. With Astoria I can expose my relational database or even a local just an XML file using a RESTful interface that utilizes the Atom Publishing Protocol or JSON. I am somewhat amused that one of the options is placing a RESTful interface over a SOAP Web Service. My, how times have changed…

It is pretty cool that Microsoft is the first major database vendor to bring the dream of the Atom store to fruition. I also like that one of the side effects of this is that there is now an AtomPub client library for .NET Framework.

Andy Conrad has a blog post entitled Linq to REST which gives an idea of what happens when you combine the Astoria client library with the Language Integrated Query (LINQ) features of C# 3.0

    [OpenObject("PropBag")]
    public class Product{
        private Dictionary<string, object> propBag = new Dictionary<string, object>();

        [Key]
        public int ProductID { get; set; }        
        public string ProductName { get; set; }        
        public int UnitsInStock { get; set; }
        public IDictionary<string, object> PropBag { get { return propBag; } }
    }

        static void Main(string[] args){
            WebDataContext context = new WebDataContext("http://localhost:18752/Northwind.svc");
            var query = from p in context.CreateQuery<Product>("Products")
                        where p.UnitsInStock > 100
                        select p;

            foreach (Product p in query){
                Console.WriteLine(p.ProductName + " , UnitsInStock= " + p.UnitsInStock);
            }

        } 

If you hover over the query variable, you will actually see the Astoria URI which the Linq query is translated into by the Astoria client library:

http://localhost:18752/Northwind.svc/Products?$filter=(UnitsInStock)%20gt%20(100)

So, there you go.  Linq to Astoria's RESTFUL API.  In other words, Linq to REST. 

Like I said earlier, this is sick. I need to holla at Andy and see if there is a dependency on the Atom feed containing Microsoft specific extensions or whether this Linq to REST capability can be utilized over any arbitrary Atom feed.

Now playing: Jay-Z - Success (feat. Nas)

A few months ago, Jenna and I found out about the Trash the Dress blog which features photo shots from wedding pictures taken in non-traditional locations. The term "trash the dress" is supposed to refer to the fact that the wedding dress is usually trashed at the end of the shoot.

Yesterday we met up with Cheryl Jones from In A Frame Photograpy and proceeded to destroy the Jenna's wedding dress while getting some good pictures out of the process. Below are a couple of pics from the shoot. Click on them to see more pics from Cheryl's blog post.

Now playing: Wyclef Jean - Sweetest Girl (feat. Akon, Lil Wayne & Niia)

This time last year, Erik Meijer sent me a paper about a new programming language project he was working on. I was high on the social graph at that time and didn't get around to responding to Erik's paper until this fall. The premise seemed fundamentally interesting; create an MSIL to Javascript compiler which is conceptually similar to Google's GWT and Nikhil Kothari's Script# then flip the traditional Web development script by allowing developers to choose whether code runs on the server or on the client by simply decorating methods with attributes. The last bit is the interesting innovation in Erik's project although it is obscured by the C#/VB/MSIL to Javascript compiler aspects.

As an example, let's say you have a function like ValidateAddress(). Whether this logic lives on the client (i.e. Javascript in the browser) or runs on the server is really a function of how complicated that function actually ends up being. Now imagine if when the time comes to refactor the function and move the validation logic from the Web client to the server or vice versa, instead of rewriting Javascript code in C#/IronPython/VB.NET/IronRuby/etc or vice versa you just add or remove a [RunAtOrigin] attribute on the function.

This project shipped last week as Microsoft Volta. You can learn a little more about it in Erik Meijer's post on Lambda the Ultimate entitled Democratizing the Cloud using Microsoft Live Labs Volta. Try it out, it's an interesting project that has legs. 

Now playing: Jay-Z - Pray

Om Malik has a blog post entitled Zuckerberg’s Mea Culpa, Not Enough where he writes

Frankly, I am myself getting sick and tired of repeating myself about the all-important “information transmission from partner sites” aspect of Beacon. That question remains unanswered in Zuckerberg’s blog post, which upon second read is rather scant on actual privacy information. Here is what he writes:

If you select that you don’t want to share some Beacon actions or if you turn off Beacon, then Facebook won’t store those actions even when partners send them to Facebook.”

So essentially he’s saying the information transmitted won’t be stored but will perhaps be interpreted. Will this happen in real time? If that is the case, then the advertising “optimization” that results from “transmissions” is going to continue. Right!

If they were making massive changes, one would have seen options like “Don’t allow any web sites to send stories to Facebook” or “Don’t track my actions outside of Facebook” in this image below.

This is the part of Facebook's Beacon service that I consider to be unfixable which probably needs to be stated more explicitly given comments like those by Sam Ruby in his post Little Details.

The fundamental design of Facebook Beacon is that a Web site publishes information about my transactions to Facebook without my permission and then Facebook tells me what happened after the fact. This is fundamentally Broken As Designed (B.A.D.).

I read Mark Zuckerburg's Thoughts on Beacon last week and looked at the new privacy controls. Nowhere is the fundamental problem addressed.

Nothing Mark Zuckerburg wrote changes the fact that when I rent a movie from Blockbuster Online, information about the transaction is published to Facebook regardless of whether I am a Facebook user or not.  The only change Zuckerburg has announced is that I can opt out of getting nagged to have the information spammed to my friends via the News Feed. One could argue that this isn't Facebook's problem. After all, when SixApart implemented support for Facebook Beacon they didn't decide that they'd blindly publish all activities from users of TypePad to Facebook. Instead they have an opt-in model on their site which preserves their users' privacy by not revealing information to Mark Zuckerburg's company without their permission. On the flip side the Blockbuster decided to publish information about all of their customers' video rental transaction history  to Mark Zuckerburg and company, without their explicit permission, even though this violates federal law. As a Blockbuster customer, the only way around this is to stop using Blockbuster's service.

So who is to blame here? Facebook for designing a system that assumes that 3rd parties publishing private user data to them without the user's consent is OK as the default or Facebook affiliates who care so little of their customer's privacy that they give it away to Facebook in return for "viral" references to their services (aka spam)?

Now playing: Akon - Ghetto (Green Lantern remix) (feat. Notorious B.I.G. & 2Pac)

I often tell people at work that turning an application into a platform is a balancing act, not only do you have to please the developers on your platform BUT you also have to please the users of your application as well.

I recently joined the This has got to stop group on Facebook. If you don't use Facebook, the front page of the group is shown in the screenshot below.

I've seen a bunch of tech folks blog about being overwhelmed by Facebook app spam like Tim Bray in his post Facebook Rules and Doc Searls in Too much face(book) time. However I assumed that the average college or high school student who used the site didn't feel that way. Looks like I was wrong.

The folks at Facebook could fix this problem easily but it would eliminate a lot of the "viralness" that has been hyped about the platform. Personally, I think applications on the site have gotten to the point where the costs have begun to outweigh the benefits. The only way to tip the balance back is to rein them in otherwise it won't be long until the clean and minimal vs. cluttered and messy aesthetics stop working in their favor in comparisons with MySpace. When that happens there will be an opportunity for someone else to do the same thing to them.

On an unrelated note,  the MoveOn.org sponsored group about Facebook Beacon has 74,000 members which is less than half of the size of the This has got to stop group.  This is despite the fact that MoveOn.org has had national media attention focused on that topic. I guess it goes to show that just because a story gets a lot of hype in blogs and the press doesn't mean that it is the most important problem facing the people it actually affects.

Now playing: Jay-Z - Ignorant Shit

One of the things that has always frustrated me about programming in C# that it is such a hassle to return multiple values from a method. You either have to create a wrapper class whose entire purpose is to hold two or three variables or even worse use ref or out parameters. I used to get around this problem in C++ by using the pair utility class since I often wanted to deal with an object plus some value associated with it. However this approach quickly breaks down when you have more than two objects you want to associate temporarily for some processing.  

For example, in the Top Stories feature of RSS Bandit I have some code that operates on a URL, its weighted score and a list of all the posts that reference it. In C#, there’s no good way to deal with those three objects as a single entity without wrapping them in a class definition. In Python, it’s quite easy to do that using tuples. Compare the following two blocks of code and notice how I don’t need the RelationHrefEntry and RankedNewsItem types in the Python version of the code

C#:     /* Tally the votes, only 1 vote counts per feed */

 //RelationHrefEntry is (Href, Score, References), RankedNewsItem is (NewsItem, Score)
List<RelationHRefEntry> weightedLinks = new List<RelationHRefEntry>();

foreach (KeyValuePair<RelationHRefEntry, List<RankedNewsItem>> linkNvotes in allLinks) {
    Dictionary<string, float> votesPerFeed = new Dictionary<string, float>();

    //pick the lower vote if multiple links from a particular feed
    foreach (RankedNewsItem voteItem in linkNvotes.Value) { 
       string feedLink = voteItem.Item.FeedLink;

       if(votesPerFeed.ContainsKey(feedLink)){
         votesPerFeed[feedLink] = Math.Min(votesPerFeed[feedLink], voteItem.Score);
       }else{
         votesPerFeed.Add(feedLink, voteItem.Score);
         linkNvotes.Key.References.Add(voteItem.Item);
       }
    }
    float totalScore = 0.0f;

    foreach (float value in votesPerFeed.Values) {
       totalScore += value;
    }
    linkNvotes.Key.Score = totalScore;
    weightedLinks.Add(linkNvotes.Key); 
}

weightedLinks.Sort(delegate(RelationHRefEntry x, RelationHRefEntry y) { return y.Score.CompareTo(x.Score);} );
weightedLinks = weightedLinks.GetRange(0, numStories);

Python:

    # tally the votes, only 1 vote counts per feed
    weighted_links = []
    for link, votes in all_links.items():
        site = {}
        for weight, item, feedTitle in votes:   #tuple magic happens here             
            site[feedTitle] = min(site.get(feedTitle,1), weight)   #Python dictionaries are smarter than .NET’s 
        weighted_links.append((sum(site.values()), link))   #more tuple magic, no need for manual summing of values 
    weighted_links.sort()
    weighted_links.reverse()

Now playing: UGK - One Day

[Scene: A married couple listening to Prince’s Little Red Corvette while driving back from the grocery store]

DARE: You know what? I think this song is a metaphor for sex.

JENNA: All songs about cars are metaphors for sex.

DARE: True.

JENNA: Well, except for Throws Some D’s…that song is actually about putting rims on your car.

DARE: Perhaps it is the exception that proves the rule?

 

Now playing: Prince - Little Red Corvette

Danny Sullivan has an article in Advertising Age entitled Forget Facebook. Search Ads Are the Revolution he writes

Facebook unleashed SocialAds this month, calling it the beginning of a revolutionary, hundred-year era in advertising that will see the end of untargeted messages in mass media. If the revolution is upon us, allow me to submit the lowly search ad as the true revolutionary. For unlike social ads and most other types of advertising, search is something people want rather than something that gets in the way.  
…
The trusted referral is indeed a holy grail, and Facebook will offer a new way to build word-of-mouth. But how did that friend find the sweetener in the first place? What comes first -- word-of-mouth or the egg? At some point, a new product has to hatch, and those old-school brand-building channels probably will always play a crucial role. Search offers a key way for new products to emerge and be spread around. People turn to search for solutions -- ways to enjoy coffee without the calories or local coffeehouses to try. If you're not visible in search, perhaps you won't generate word-of-mouth as easily, if at all.

Search isn't revolutionary for aiding word-of-mouth, however. It's revolutionary for not "getting into" or in the way of anything. People turn to search when they have particular desires and need particular solutions.

I agree with Danny that the search advertising like AdWords is revolutionary while word-of-mouth advertising platforms like Facebook’s SocialAds are evolutionary.  With search ads, for the first time in the history of advertising people can find advertising when they are looking for it and otherwise it stays out of their way. When I search for digital camera or zune 80 it is quite likely that I’m making a purchasing decision so showing me ads related to buying these devices makes sense. On the other hand, when I search for foreach C# or XmlTextReader.NodeType I don’t get irrelevant ads shoved in my face. That level of match making between given consumers and advertisers is unprecedented. 

However this doesn’t mean that there isn’t something to be said for brand advertising and word of mouth. For search advertising to work, I actually have to have been looking for something in the first place. A lot of advertising today is intended to create the desire for a product in the first place not help you make an informed choice.  For example, I saw the movie Enchanted last weekend. I found out about the movie from TV ads and thought what I saw looked funny. My wife also came to the same conclusion from watching similar ads and then we decided to see the movie. After seeing the movie, I thought it was great and rated the movie in the Flixster Facebook application which sent out the following notification to my “friends”

a few days later, one of my co-workers said she saw the movie on the strength of my recommendation and other factors.

This story is a small case study in the effectiveness of traditional “media-based” advertising coupled with the power of word-of-mouth marketing using social networking sites. For now, search ads simply cannot provide a similar level of return value for such advertisers. Although search engines like Google have tried to encourage this behavior, people don’t typically perform searches like movies 98052 then decide what movies to see that weekend based on the search results page. This means that for certain classes of products, traditional advertising techniques in combination with word-of-mouth techniques like Facebook’s social ads are extremely valuable.

However at the end of the day, it is extremely unlikely that improved word-of-mouth techniques will be as impactful to the long tail of advertisers as search ads have been or ever will be. 

Now playing: Tear Da Club Up Thugs - Triple Six Clubhouse

Earlier this week I wrote a blog post which pointed out that the two major privacy and user experience problems with Facebook Beacon where that it (i) linked a user's Facebook account with an account on another site without the users permission and (ii) there was no way for a user to completely opt out of being tracked by the system.  Since then Facebook has announced some changes which TechCrunch named Facebook Beacon 2.0. The changes are excerpted below

Notification

Facebook users will see a notification in the lower right corner of the screen after transacting with a Beacon Affiliate. Options include “No Thanks” that will immediately stop the transaction from being published. Alternatively closing or ignoring the warning won’t immediately publish the story, but it will be put in a queue

Second Warning

Presuming you’ve ignored or closed the first notification, Facebook warns users again the next time they visit their home page. A new box reminds you that an activity has been sent to Facebook. Like the first notification you can choose to not publish the activity by hitting remove, or you can choose to publish it by hitting ok.

...

Opt Out
Found via the “External Websites” section of the Facebook Privacy page, this allows users to permanently opt in or out of Beacon notifications, or if you’re not sure be notified. The downside is that there is no global option to opt out of every Beacon affiliated program; it has to be set per program. Better this than nothing I suppose.

The interesting thing to note is that neither of the significant problems with Beacon have been fixed. After the changes were announced there was a post on the CA Security Advisory blog titled Facebook's Misrepresentation of Beacon's Threat to Privacy: Tracking users who opt out or are not logged in which pointed out that the complaining about purchase history getting into the news feed of your friends is a red herring, the real problem is that once a site signs up as a Facebook affiliate they begin to share every significant action you take on the site with Facebook without your permission. 

Which is worse, your friends knowing that you rented Prison Girls or Facebook finding that out without your permission and sharing that with their business partners, without your permission? Aren't there laws against this kind of invasion of privacy? I guess there are (see 18 U.S.C. § 2710)

I wonder who'll be first to sue Facebook and Blockbuster? 

Anyway, back to the title of this blog post. The problem with Facebook Beacon is that it is designed in a way that makes it easy for Facebook Beacon affiliates to integrate into their sites at the cost of user's privacy. From Jay Goldman's excellent post where he Deconstructed the Facebook Beacon Javascript we learn

Beacon from 10,000 Feet

That basically wraps up our tour of how Beacon does what it does. It's a fairly long explanation, so here's a quick summary:

1. The partner site page includes the beacon.js file, sets a <meta> tag with a name, and then calls Facebook.publish_action.            
2. Facebook.publish_action builds a query_params object and then passes it to Facebook._send_request.            
3. Facebook._send_request dynamically generates an <iframe>which loads the URL http://www.facebook.com/beacon/auth_iframe.php and passes the query_params. At this point, Facebook now knows about the news feed item whether you choose to publish it or not. 

When you read this you realize just how insidious the problem actually is. Facebook isn't simply learning about every action taken by Facebook users on affiliate sites, it is learning about every action taken by every user of these affiliate sites regardless of whether they are Facebook users or not.

At first I assumed that the affiliates sites would call some sort of IsFacebookUser() API and then decide whether to send the action or not. Of course, this is still broken since the affiliate site has told Facebook that you are a user of the site, and depending on the return value of the hypothetical function the affiliate in turn learns that you are a Facebook user.

But no, it is actually worse than that. The affiliate sites are pretty much dumping their entire customer database into Facebook's lap, FOR FREE and without their customers permission. What. The. Fuck.

The icing on the cake is the following excerpt from the Facebook Beacon page

Stories of a user's engagement with your site may be displayed in his or her profile and in News Feed. These stories will act as a word-of-mouth promotion for your business and may be seen by friends who are also likely to be interested in your product. You can increase the number of friends who see these stories with Facebook Social Ads.

So after giving Facebook millions of dollars in customer intelligence for free in exchange for spamming their users, Facebook doesn't even guarantee their affiliates that the spam will even get sent. Instead these sites have to pay Facebook to "increase the chances" that they get some return for the free customer intelligence they just gave Facebook.

This reminds me of the story of Tom Sawyer tricking people into paying him to paint a fence he was supposed to paint as part of his chores.

At the end of the day, Facebook can't fix the privacy problems I mentioned in my previous post in a way that completely preserves their users privacy without completely changing the design and implementation of Facebook Beacon. Until then, we'll likely see more misdirection, more red herrings and more violations of user privacy to make a quick buck.