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.

• August 7th, 2009

  My BFF Selena Gomez

  For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been getting occasional IMs and e-mails from what I can only assume are tween-age girls, asking if I work for Facebook. (“I need to talk to Facebook Team about something important, very important.”) I mostly ignored the emails, assuming that some version of a “facebook employee” Google search [...]

• March 12th, 2009

  Want to make some money?

  Can you write Facebook or iPhone Apps? Do you like money? If so, have I got a deal for you: We’re looking for some help building out our iPhone and Facebook applications for Mahalo Answers. If you know of any great developers who have done a really solid application for either platform (or who are [...]

• 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 29th, 2008

  Mahalo Share Goes to 11

  One of the latest things I’ve been working on at Mahalo is Mahalo Share. It’s a utility that automatically posts links that you want to share to 11 different services: del.icio.us, Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku, your Tumblr blog, Ma.gnolia, Faves, Pownce, Mahalo, StumbleUpon, and/or Google Bookmarks. All of this cross-posting is done behind the scenes using [...]

• January 7th, 2008

  Wikia Search violates Facebook’s TOS

  Today is not going well for Wikia Search. After launching to less-than-stellar reviews, it has been discovered that they are violating Facebook’s TOS with their “Invite from Social Networks” feature. Here’s how the feature works: you select “Facebook” from the list of networks and enter your username and password. Wikia Search then goes off and [...]

• 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 [...]