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 5th, 2008

  Facebook Scavenger: Now with vCard support

  I’ve updated Facebook Scavenger (a Firefox extension that saves a backup your Facebook friends’ profile data) to add vCard export support. You can download this new version (1.1) from the Facebok Scavenger homepage, and you might want to hurry. A little birdie told me that this handy tool might not be available for too much [...]

• January 3rd, 2008

  Take your Facebook data with you

  Earlier today, I mentioned that it wouldn’t be out of the question to write a Firefox extension that would grab profile data about your Facebook friends as you view their profiles so that you could take that data to another service. Given that, allow me to introduce Facebook Scavenger. It’s a Firefox extension that saves [...]