Less Talk, More Do

I am a design engineer at Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, working with the Theme Team to address the design concerns of millions of WordPress users.

• March 22nd, 2008

  Facebook Lock-in

  Gervase Markham has an insightful post about Facebook’s lock-in policy with regards to e-mail. He has a way of writing about the situation that clearly explains the points I’d like to make but can never form into coherent paragraphs.

• March 13th, 2008

  Takedown’d

  I received this lovely letter from Facebook‘s lawyers earlier today. The key points are transcribed below: “Dear Mr. Finke: I am writing you concerning the Firefox extensions you posted at: www.chrisfinke.com/addons/facebook-image-to-email and www.chrisfinke.com/addons/facebook-scavenger These plug-ins are deeply concerning to Facebook because, among other things, they violate Facebook’s trademark rights, its Terms of Service, the security [...]

• January 7th, 2008

  In which I avoid being sued

  At the request of (and under the threats of legal action from) Facebook, I’ve taken down the Facebook Image-to-Email and Facebook Scavenger Firefox extensions. Facebook claims that any method of automating against their site is a TOS violation, although if that were true, simply using a Web browser to convert their raw HTML code into [...]

• January 3rd, 2008

  Proposal for (legally) acquiring data from Facebook

  There’s a big debate going on today about Robert Scoble getting booted from Facebook for harvesting data about his friends with a bot. The relevant portion of the Facebook TOS that he violated is this: “You agree not to: [...] use automated scripts to collect information from or otherwise interact with the Service or the [...]

• January 3rd, 2008

  Facebook Image-to-Email: Back from the grave

  A while back I mentioned that Facebook Image-to-Email (a Firefox extension that converts Facebook’s e-mail address images to plain-text) was broken after some unknown change was made by Facebook. I am happy to announce that it is working again, after I re-tooled it with a different method for accessing the image data of those e-mail [...]

• November 16th, 2007

  Facebook Image-to-Email: Broken Again

  I am aware that the Facebook Image-to-Email Firefox extension is (once again) broken, and given that version 1.1 installed on Firefox 2.0.0.8 was working, and now version 1.1 installed on Firefox 2.0.0.8 is not working, it has to be due to a change that Facebook made. The problem is that I can’t discern any relevant [...]

• November 1st, 2007

  Facebook Image-to-Email Working Again

  I’ve just updated the Facebook Image-to-Email Firefox extension to be compatible with Facebook’s new image generation algorithm. (Facebook Image-to-Email converts e-mail addresses in images to plain text.) This new version should be a little more robust; if it can’t convert the image to text, it appends a small question mark after the image, rather than [...]

• September 11th, 2007

  Convert Facebook e-mail images to actual e-mail links

  The massively popular social network Facebook uses images to display the e-mail addresses of your friends, making it impossible to copy the e-mail address or click on it to send e-mails to your friends, thus making Facebook’s own proprietary in-site messaging system more attractive to its users. Yesterday, Gervase Markham posited that it should be [...]