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.

• 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 [...]

• January 3rd, 2008

  Scoble stole my data…

  Had a great idea while watching ScobleShow. 5,000 of Scoble’s friends, at $10 a pop means $50,000 in revenue for me. Submit your orders in the comment section below.

• 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 [...]

• October 25th, 2007

  Facebook is not worth 15 billion dollars

  ($240,000,000 / (0.016 + x)) != $15,000,000,000 Attention world: Microsoft did not pay $240 million simply for a 1.6% stake in Facebook. They paid $240 million for a 1.6% stake in Facebook and the privilege of being Facebook’s only ad supplier for visitors from outside the United States. So unless you’re valuing that privilege at [...]

• 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 [...]