Monthly Archives: January 2008

Browser Add-ons, Mozilla Firefox

Very important news for Firefox extension developers

If you’ve written an extension for Firefox and you want it to work correctly in Firefox 3, read this right now. The ID of the navigational toolbox has been changed from “navigator-toolbox” to “browser-toolbox,” and you’ll need to update your code to reflect this change. Basically, if any part of your extension adds a toolbar button or a new toolbar to the top part of the browser, you’ve got some changes to make.

Update: Never mind; they worked out a new fix that doesn’t involve chaning the toolbox id.

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anyInventory, Blog, Toby

Here’s What You Should Think

I’ve imported all of the posts from my first blog (“Here’s What You Should Think”), which I started and ended in 2004. Most of them are related to Toby, a webmail client I wrote in college, and anyInventory, an open-source inventory system I was developing around the same time.

Update: I am no longer involved in the development of anyInventory.

Update: Toby is no longer supported. I recommend using RoundCube Webmail instead.

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Browser Add-ons, Del.icio.us, Facebook, Mahalo, Mahalo Share, Mozilla Firefox, Pownce, StumbleUpon, Twitter

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.

Mahalo Share dialog box

All of this cross-posting is done behind the scenes using various APIs, so there aren’t additional popup windows to fill out for each service. We’ll be adding more services as they’re requested.

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Facebook

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.

invite-form.png

Wikia Search then goes off and scrapes your Facebook profile page for a list of your friends and presents you with a display of these friends (hotlinking their profile images from Facebook’s servers, no less), allowing you to check which ones you’d like to invite to Wikia Search:

invite-grid.png

After you finish with that, it uses your login information again to send a Facebook message to the friends that you checked, appearing to be one written personally by you:

“Christopher sent you a message.

Subject: Search Wikia

I found this great new site called Search Wikia. Go here http://alpha.search.wikia.com/account/addaccount.html to create your account. I am already a member there. Check it out. Christopher Finke”

The problem with all of this is that it blatantly violates these portions of Facebook’s TOS:

“You agree not to use the Service or the Site to: […]

  • harvest or collect […] contact information of other users from the Service or the Site by electronic or other means for the purposes of sending unsolicited emails or other unsolicited communications
  • use automated scripts to collect information from or otherwise interact with the Service or the Site”

You’d think that with the whole Plaxo/Robert Scoble fiasco last week, Wikia Search would have considered removing this feature before launch to avoid the inevitable backlash when their users start getting banned from Facebook after using this feature.

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Facebook, Facebook Image-to-Email, Facebook Scavenger

In which I avoid being sued

Banned by Facebook 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 readable text and images would constitute a violation.

I maintain that both tools provided a useful service that Facebook has neglected to provide itself, but I will not continue to make them available via this website. Facebook has also confirmed to me via e-mail that it will not offer users the option of having their e-mail address displayed in plain clickable text, under the guise of protecting the users’ privacy. (E-mail addresses are already visible as images, but you can’t click on them to send the user a message. This has the serendipitious side-effect of making Facebook’s own in-site messaging system a much more attractive method of communication for Facebook users.)

A couple of things to note: while I obviously cannot retrieve any copies of these extensions that have already been downloaded, Facebook feels quite strongly that the usage of Image-to-Email and Scavenger violates their Terms of Service. They cannot stop you from using it, but they can (in theory) test for the presence of either extension and ban you from their site if you have them installed. Contact me privately via e-mail if you’re concerned about your usage being detected in this manner.

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Browser Add-ons, Facebook, Facebook Scavenger, Mozilla Firefox

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 longer.

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API, Del.icio.us, Mahalo, Mahalo Follow, Twitter

Mahalo Follow 3.0

We just rolled out Mahalo Follow 3.0, and the big new feature this time around is the ability to cross-post any links you recommend to Mahalo via the Follow toolbar between Twitter, del.icio.us, and Ma.gnolia. Just add your account info (process shown below), and after recommending a link for a Mahalo search term, your link will be auto-posted to whichever services you set up via the service’s API.

Follow 3.0’s Preferences Dialog

Notice that you can choose which services to cross-post to each time you recommend a link.

Example of Follow 3.0’s new feature

Follow 3.0 is compatible with Firefox 1.5 through 3.0 Beta 2 and Flock 1.0.*, and you can install it at the Mahalo Follow homepage.

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Browser Add-ons, Facebook, Facebook Scavenger, Mozilla Firefox, Robert Scoble

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 data (including e-mail addresses) from Facebook profiles that you view and then allows you to export that data in CSV format.

Robert Scoble Note that this extension does not violate Facebook’s TOS since it does not automatically load pages to retrieve profile data; rather, it reformats data that you have already seen on pages that you yourself loaded. Robert Scoble could have saved himself a lot of trouble (and avoided a lot of that nasty publicity that I’m sure he hates ;-) had he just used this extension for a few days.

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Facebook, Facebook Image-to-Email, Robert Scoble

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 Site;”

But according to the same TOS,

“you are granted a limited license to access and use the Site and the Site Content and to download or print a copy of any portion of the Site Content to which you have properly gained access solely for your personal, non-commercial use, provided that you keep all copyright or other proprietary notices intact.”

So you can download/print the data on the site for personal use, but you can’t write a bot to go out and get it. Fair enough, but what if someone were to write, oh, I don’t know, a Firefox extension that sits quietly in the background while you browse Facebook, and as you manually view your friends’ pages, it takes the data from the browser’s cache, grabs the info you want (like, oh, I don’t know, their e-mail addresses), and allows you to export that in a common format, like CSV. That wouldn’t break the Facebook TOS, since there is no automatic collection of information from Facebook’s servers (just the browser cache), but you could still have the info you want in an easy to read (and easy to import) format. It might not be a reasonable solution for people with 5,000 friends, but for us regular Joes, we could easily spend half an hour and have all the data we need from Facebook.

Anyway, it’s just a thought; it’s not like I’m planning on doing this or anything. Since when am I the kind of person to irk a large social networking site by making their data easily available?

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Browser Add-ons, Facebook, Facebook Image-to-Email, Mozilla Firefox

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 address images.

You can download this new release from the Facebook Image-to-Email homepage. If you don’t care to know more about the technical details, stop reading now.

Technical wrap-up: In previous versions, I was injecting JavaScript into the document and doing all of the processing of the images there. This is a pain, but because webpage JavaScript is not allowed to access the data of images from a different domain (and JavaScript running in the chrome couldn’t seem to do it either), there wasn’t much choice. At some point, Facebook made a change to their pages or the server that their images come from, and this method of parsing the images broke.

What I’ve done is this: instead of accessing the images directly, the extension now takes a screenshot of the entire page (allowed under the browser’s security policies), locates the portions of the page that contain the e-mail address images, and parses them out entirely from the browser’s chrome, a beautiful place with much looser security restrictions than a webpage. (I’ve also added character maps for “-” (hyphen) and the “r.” sequence that wasn’t being parsed properly.)

(Sidenote with relevance to current events: this extension is now a hop, skip, and a jump away from being able to be used to parse and download all of your friends’ information, including e-mail addresses. If Scoble had only waited, he could have avoided this whole mess.)

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