Facebook is scaring me - <AUTHOR> http://scripting.com/stories/2011/09/24/facebookIsScaringMe.html <comment><USER4> I recommend Ghostery: <http://www.ghostery.com/>

Quoting:

Ghostery is your window into the invisible web – tags, web bugs, pixels and beacons that are included on web pages in order to get an idea of your online behavior.

Ghostery tracks the trackers and gives you a roll-call of the ad networks, behavioral data providers, web publishers, and other companies interested in your activity.

Choose to block - or not. You get control at a company level - are there some marketers you trust, but others you'd rather turn away? Ghostery lets you open the valve of your web behavior as wide or as narrow as you'd prefer.

<comment><USER5> Ghostery and Disconnect are essential privacy tools in Firefox, Safari, or Chrome. Also try ShareNot on Firefox, which is experimental, but has somewhat more extensive blocking coverage than Disconnect.

But more fundamental: don't log in unless you have to, log in only in private browsing windows or separate browsers from your other surfing, and also clear your cookies often to keep your not-logged-in browsing cleaner from a privacy perspective.

<comment><USER6> Just a note: Neither Ghostery or Disconnect work in Chrome, since Chrome doesn't have any kind of ability to block requests from being made. The experimental webRequest API should help with that, but it hasn't been released yet.

<comment><USER7> can you clarify? both ghostery and disconnect do install and run in chrome - <USER2> have them running now. are you saying that there is some particular functionality that they don't provide?

also, responding to the (grand) parent, someone else mentioned that flash cookies are cross-browser. so if fb uses those you need to also make sure that the fb browser doesn't have flash installed.

<comment><USER6> They both install and run, but they use beforeRequest and edit the page content. This works in theory, but in practice there is no guarantee that the script will be loaded into the page before the tracker assets are. The ghostery/disconnect addons succeed in blocking trackers sometimes, but not all. Ghostery handles it a bit better than Disconnect does, as it will actually tell you which trackers it was able to block and which it wasn't.

The experimental webRequest API will solve that by providing a synchronous way for scripts to deny/allow connections before any requests are made, but webRequest won't be made available to non-experimental addons for a few months at the minimum.

More info: [https://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/trunk/experimental...](https://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/trunk/experimental.webRequest.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm an engineer at facebook. I want to clear up a few things that you guys are talking about.

For starters, it's true that a visit to a news story or watching a video will trigger a feed story. The point that most people seem to be missing is that this requires you to knowingly allow a social application. For example, in my case, I installed the social plugin for rdio (rdio.com). When I listen to a song on rdio, it publishes it to my friends ticker feeds. (Ticker is the bar on the side where likes, listens, reads, etc go). There are a couple websites that are doing read social browsing, for example the Washington Post's social reader (<https://apps.facebook.com/wpsocialreader/>). Again, just by visiting this page you will not trigger anything unless you have already allowed the application access.

In the past I've setup my music player on the laptop to publish the songs I'd been listening to, to my IM client (as away messages) - Adium let's me do this out of the box. It's kind of the same idea, instead this is just built in to the website you visit or music you listen to.

You can also disable any application you previously installed by going to Privacy Settings and clicking on Apps and Websites. It should all be there. You don't have to log out of facebook or close your account. Just delete all your social apps. (<https://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy>)

<comment><USER9> Is it retroactive to apps that you've installed previously? For example, I signed in with my Facebook account on 3rd party site X and accepted the permissions, and at the time it didn't auto-publish to my feed (or "ticker" or whatever), but now suddenly it will be publishing automatically without my explicit say-so?

<comment><USER10> No. It is a brand new permission that must be granted.

You will know since the dialog will be centered around "Add to Timeline" instead of "Authorize this app".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I am a software engineer at Facebook. Bear with me because I don't have any PR-quality answer to give you. I am not on the platform team, but I have built apps before in the wild-west days.

The app requires explicit permission from the user in order to post activities automatically. The idea, if you watched Mark's presentation, is called "frictionless sharing." A lot of people don't share because it's another step, but if they could install an app like the Washington Post Reader (a great app --even Mark has it installed), they are happy with sharing articles they've read with their friends.

I understand you might be concerned, for example if you added that app without realizing that it will post content. If you are concerned about the privacy implications, you can always change individual permissions for an app by going to your account settings, then selecting the 'app' tab on the left, or by going to <https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=applications>. If you are concerned about spamming your friends' news feeds, that's why we built ticker, for the light-weight activities like "watched a movie" or "listened to a song" or "read an article".

If I remember correctly, the exact wording of the app permission request was alarming enough to get my full attention ("I, the application, can post as you" or something like that), so I'm worried less about a user missing that part. In my known experiences, the app was installed with the knowledge that it will share your experiences--because the idea is you want to share your activities with your friends. As soon as I read an article, my first action is to either send the link to specific people who are interested, or post it on my wall if I think everyone is interested.

We operate under the assumption that users will not do what they don't want to do, as long as we make it explicit what might happen. And if they make a mistake, they can always go change their settings. So I'm not so worried about users who sign up for the Washington Post Reader app, which is marketed as a social reading experiment, and subsequently complain that it shares your read articles.

You might still be concerned, in which case, please let me know why (users being misinformed?), and I'll try to pass it onto the platform folks, who were really heads-down the past few months.

<comment> X-Istence The reason why this bothers me is that there is no longer any EXPLICIT confirmation that I want to post something. Not sure who said it but I read it in a TechCrunch article, "Just hit play in Spotify and it will share with your friends".

No, any sharing I do HAS to REQUIRE an EXPLICIT action on my part. I have to be in full control. Visiting a web site does not mean that I believe it will be interesting to my friends NOR do I want that information shared with people on Facebook.

A like button that shares, much like the Google+ 1+ button is perfectly fine, I have to hover over it, and choose my circles to share with, and then share. It is not automatic once I visit the site.

I don't want articles automatically being linked just because I visited a page, or clicked play in Spotify, or put the toilet seat up.

It is not just privacy concerns, it is the image I try to convey while using social media sites where it is common place to be friends with your boss and or co-workers. I don't need them knowing I like the Bloodhound Gang or that I read articles about atheism in the NYT but have never read a single article about religion.

Eventually all this collected data will be used against me. What if I do a simple Google search for cancer and I end up reading an article about it, that is now shared publicly, my insurance company a few years later gets a claim for cancer they claim it was a pre-existing condition and deny me coverage.

These are all scenarios going through my head. I am all for the interconnected web, and making it easier for me to introduce my friends to new content across it, however it has to be done on my terms, it has to require explicit authorisation and must never do something automatically without my consent. If I like the content enough I am extremely likely to copy and paste the URL into my social networking sites, I don't mind that extra step. Create a bookmarklet that fills in some of the forms ahead of time for me (I have a reddit bookmarklet that fills out title, URL and the sub-reddit to post in (personal one for me to share links with friends)). I am more than happy to continue using the platform, but this frictionless sharing scares the crap out of me, and will see me closing my account sooner rather than later if it continues down the path that it looks to be going down.

<comment><USER12> It's eminently possible to just live life without Facebook. I stopped using it a few years ago, although more because I was being drowned with useless information from other people ('hand stuck in toaster again, LOL') than out of privacy concerns.

<comment><USER13> I agree with you there. I hated Facebook because I made everyone I ever knew a "friend", and it was depressing because of how dull these people were. I canceled my account and haven't thought about it again; Facebook provided me with no value. I still don't see why other people like it so much; if you want to chat with your friends, why not go get some coffee or beer together?

<comment><USER14> Maybe because not everyone lives 10 minutes from each other and is 100% independently mobile? And gee... occasionally even people that you really enjoy spending time with have to move to other areas of the planet.

As much as I'm not a fan of FB re all the privacy stuff (not to mention a history of horribly under/wrongly-documented and semi-broken APIs), it's done wonders for a large generation of web users in terms of allowing them to easily (and consistently) share their lives with a lot of their friends and family. I see that aspect as a good thing.

<comment><USER15> People could easily share lives with their friends and families long before Facebook. Email, IM etc. But not a whole lot of people seemed to bother with it. Now Facebook brainwashed everyone that it's almost irresponsible not to share.

<comment><USER16> Alternate explanation: Facebook made it much easier to do things which were once possible, but hard. So more people do them more often.

<comment><USER15> Facebook is not the only and surely not the first easy-to-share service. Why are we so focused on Facebook today? Marketing.

<comment><USER17> No, because the people you know are there and use it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I recently decided to RSVP for a meetup on meetup.com. It was a meetup I don't, in fact, want most folks I know to know about. I made sure to use my junk email account that doesn't have my name tied to it.

So I was scared shitless when after RSVP'ing I see faces of all my facebook friends and an offer to invite them. I always thought you had to do the whole facebook connect crap before websites could just splash your fb friends list at you? Then I thought about all the billion different ways facebook has to integrate them into your site and figured this must be one of the ways.

<comment><USER19> If you don't immediate terminate your fb account when you see this, you're like one of those people who can't leave their abuser.

That's just all there is to it.

Just as a matter of interest, has anyone ever taken a close look at what's actually in the static content that you can download when you quit fb?

<comment><USER20> Pretty much any of it. If there's a photo I want a friend of mine to see, but they don't have permission to see it, I just send them the URL of the static content and it works every time, whether or not they're logged in.

<comment><USER21> No longer. Images are obfuscated (view the source of a gallery image to see what I mean).

<comment> X-Istence So you are not able to view the following link:

[https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak- snc4/148199_...](https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak- snc4/148199_509098132490_138900699_30219016_5205632_n.jpg)

Just for reference the picture should be this:

<http://imgur.com/UYs6H>

Oh ... the way I uploaded that to imgur? Using that URL above, so clearly that is wide open to the world.

<comment><USER22> Bert, your facebook profile ID is in that URL (the number starting with 1389...).

Also, there is no restriction on who can see pictures when you a direct link to an image. This is mostly due to the fact that CDNs used to store static files usually don't send cookies and thus have no concept of a session.

<comment> X-Istence My personal portfolio site is listed in my HackerNews profile, on my portfolio site I have a link to my Facebook profile (so that people I give my business card to are able to more easily find me, and not my dad).

I am familiar with what is in the URL, and I am also familiar with CDN's. I was merely posting my rebuttal to the OP who said it was obfuscated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I ditched Facebook this morning when I realized my carefully-constructed "Don't show this part of my profile" list was wiped out in the last redesign.

I've always thought the complaints people make after each redesign were simply resistance to change, but this time it doesn't seem worth it to continue.

<comment><USER24> Could you be a little more specific? What kinds of things were you not showing that are now showing?

<comment><USER23> I had my privacy settings set to "Custom" for wall posts, photos, and some other profile elements.

I excluded a list of people from seeing posts I made and posts other people put on my wall.

When I used the "View my profile as," I wouldn't see the excluded elements.

Once the new design launch, I realized that all these settings were lost - <USER3> can do "View my profile as" one of the people on my excluded list, and see the stuff I didn't want shown.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> If people think Zuckerberg had "vision" doing this, I suppose I agree. But his vision wasn't "how can I help people have better online connections and experiences?" or anything like that. His vision was "how can I get people to share everything about their life, so Facebook can make more money?"

They are not one and the same thing, because in the latter, the priority is put on optimizing the experience for _Facebook_ , not for the _user_.

Zuckerberg actually believes that there should be no privacy - at all. This is where he's leading Facebook. I believe that's a flawed vision, but he's probably sticking to it, because the less privacy you have, the more it helps the company.

<comment><USER26> _Zuckerberg actually believes that there should be no privacy - at all. This is where he's leading Facebook. I believe that's a flawed vision, but he's probably sticking to it, because the less privacy you have, the more it helps the company._

My impression is that Zuckerberg honestly believes that the world would be better without privacy. Which is even worse than companies that are only focused on the bottom line, because at least they won't invade your privacy without a good business reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The apologetic posts by Facebook engineers give deep insights.

Of course they can argue well on what are, for average users, technical details. On that level, it is possible to get entangled in endless discussions.

The real problem is that these posters seem to totally lack (or ignore) an understanding of the bigger picture of what they are contributing to.

</comment><comment><USER28> I think Ghostery deserves some promotion here : <http://www.ghostery.com/> available for all major browsers. It blocks near to all webbugs including the facebook social plugins.

<comment><USER29> Great Scott, they've got an Opera plugin. ([https://addons.opera.com/en/addons/extensions/details/ghoste...](https://addons.opera.com/en/addons/extensions/details/ghostery/))

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> A good time to point out the Ghostery Browser extension. Use this at the most paranoid setting so that when FB and others pull stunts like these you have at least some measure of protection.

</comment><comment><USER31> Logging out doesn't necessarily disable the tracking, though, as the cookies are still there. You could delete them, but I bet the like buttons reset new ones, which correlates your history to you the next time you log back in.

Much better is to just nullroute their netblocks at your router. That's what I do.

<comment><USER32> where does one find these netblocks?

<comment><USER33> You could use chrome's facebook disconnect extension [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ejpepffjfmamnambag...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ejpepffjfmamnambagiibghpglaidiec)

<comment><USER31> That only works in one browser, on one computer. I have an iPad and there are two iPhones in this household as well. A few lines in the firewall configuration is a much easier and effective solution.

I am working up to doing the same for Google. I might transparently proxy google.com/search to Scroogle just so browser search bars continue to work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> As always Winer is worried, rightfully so, but people aren't going to log out of facebook. It seems Zuck really wants to get back at people for making him pull "Beacon" back then, so he reintroduced it. Of course it's a privacy concern, but i think people no longer have illusions about their privacy on facebook.

<comment><USER35> "people aren't going to log out of facebook."

I actually have a separate browser that I use just for Facebook. Granted I only do this because FB doesn't work for me in Chrome, but it's still a pretty easy way of getting the same result.

<comment><USER36> Correct me if I'm wrong, but flash cookies are cross-browser

<comment><USER37> Here's my crontab:

      # NJC 08/07/10      Remove Flash cookies and everything to do with Flash, including left-over Flash files in /tmp
      01  13  *   *   Wed     /usr/bin/rm -rf /home/nick/.macromedia/Flash_Player/*
      02  13  *   *   Wed     /usr/bin/rm -rf /tmp/Flash*

<comment><USER36> Nice stuff. I would have never thought to do this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Oh, so Facebook already sent their minions to HN? That was fast! Lately the negative stories are gaining a bit of a momentum. Very much like that development.

</comment><comment><USER39> I've been logging in to Facebook and Google+ _only_ in a Chrome Incognito window for this reason for a while now. I recommend the practice to everyone.

However, yesterday Facebook locked my account because I was browsing "from an unknown device" (the netbook I've been using for years, on the IP address of PyCon Argentina). I unlocked it by identifying five of my Friends from 15 photos. So it's not without its drawbacks.

<comment><USER40> In this case your account probably was not locked, you just needed to provide additional information to log in because something seemed unusual. So if you logged in from a known-good environment (ie, a computer we know you have logged in before), it would work - you aren't locked out of your account.

This is one of a few different systems we have to protect our users - in this case from having their credentials used if they are exposed through others sites, through phishing, or through some other mechanisms. You can a little about it at <https://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=389991097130>

The social authentication is one way we help people verify their identity in these cases - you can read about it at <https://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=486790652130> . There are others - the easiest for most people is through sending a text message to your phone when you log in from a new device, which you can read about at <https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150172618258920>

If you are concerned about privacy, but not happy about having to log in from scratch each time and occasionally have to go through these steps (or not comfortable giving or not able to give a phone number for text message authentication), you might want to use a separate dedicated browser for Facebook that does have cookies enabled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> This is why I block FB in the hosts file (<https://gist.github.com/1197453>) and only use my mobile devices for FB messaging.

</comment><comment><USER42> One of the good way to make general users/facebook realize the privacy concerns of auto-sharing, if popular Porn websites install the FB like buttons.

</comment><comment><USER43> LOL at all the facebook employees who are chiming into this thread (and others) to defend the latest creepery from their professionally invasive advertising company. I know you're just waiting for the IPO to cash in, but come on, how can you defend this nonsense?

<comment><USER44> It's the All-Hands Kool Aid Q&As with Zuck on Friday.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Logging out of Facebook does not do enough. It still retains cookies that specify your account ID even after you logout.

You need to delete all of the Facebook cookies. Here is what cookies are retained, but you can test it for yourself to see.

While logged in:

       datr, lu, openid_p, c_user, sct, xs and act

act is your account number. now a new, fresh request after hitting logout still sends the following cookies:

       datr, openid_p, act, L, locale, lu, lsd, reg_fb_gate, reg_fb_ref

If you do not delete cookies Facebook know and can track every user that has ever logged in at your computer.

</comment><comment><USER46> I can recommend Fanboy's "Annoyance Block List". It will block requests to Twitter, Facebook, ... unless you are opening one of their sites directly.

(*) <http://www.fanboy.co.nz/adblock/>

<comment><USER47> Don't miss the "Tracking/Stats Blocking" as well.

Note that these are simply filters for AdBlock Plus. If you're already using it, it's pretty easy to add a couple more filters.

<comment><USER46> To block tracking I subscribed to EasyPrivacy ( _).

(_) <http://easylist.adblockplus.org/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment> mike-cardwell RequestPolicy users are protected against this entire class of problem. When I'm looking at a webpage, I know it isn't pulling in content from any other site, including Facebook, unless I specifically allow it to.

</comment><comment><USER48> This is the wild west and Facebook is doing a land grab.

</comment><comment><USER6> 127.0.0.1 facebook.com

127.0.0.1 www.facebook.com

127.0.0.1 connect.facebook.com

127.0.0.1 fbcdn.com

<comment><USER47> If you're going to go that route, it's much better to use 0.0.0.0 so that you're not sending HTTP requests to your machine. Otherwise, anything listening on port 80 (or 443, in some cases) will be receiving the requests intended for Facebook.

<comment><USER49> Good point, though that leads to a really simple hack to see part of what gets sent to facebook - just hook up something listening on those two and look at the logs? I like ngrep for that kind of thing, but it's perhaps perverse overkill.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I recently built a website on wordpress and put in facebook connect plugin. It saves ppl a few minutes to login ect. I was extremely scared about the widget that shows who has been on the site. I do not believe that just logging in gives a website permission to publish that user has been to that website. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Facebook is getting out of hand.

<comment><USER40> There is no widget that shows who has been on the site, and it is not related to using Connect.

There is a "Like" widget, which shows who has "Liked" the site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> From the RWW article, it looks like you have to enable a "social news app" for this to be an issue. I don't know why anyone would do that.

<comment><USER52> Nope, the JS that Facebook gives people to embed a Like button on their page, sends the URL of the page back to FB without actually being clicked. [http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/germany-facebook-like- but...](http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/germany-facebook-like-button- violates-privacy-laws/2837)

<comment><USER53> So how many of us are concerned about this from a personal privacy point of view, but still have all the Facebook buttons and markup all over our sites?

I'm a little concerned that, as a website operator, I really ought to work with Facebook because it will lead to more PVs because it is advertising my site for me.

But I've been uncomfortable for some time as I watch my friends and my children slowly confuse the web and Facebook. It's easy to see a day when, for most non-techy folks, the web _is_ Facebook.

So, I can close my FB account. But I think, in the spirit of doing the right thing for the world, the web and the future, I also have to take Facebook off my site and face whatever consequences that may bring.

Or am I being a fuddy-duddy old reactionary?

<comment><USER52> You can implement a "two-click like" button that mostly solves the problem. [http://www.heise.de/ct/artikel/2-Klicks-fuer-mehr- Datenschut...](http://www.heise.de/ct/artikel/2-Klicks-fuer-mehr- Datenschutz-1333879.html) (German) Just be sure not to make your non-standard FB button look like the official one because they will get on your back about trademarks. [http://adland.tv/content/heise-creates-two-click-facebook- bu...](http://adland.tv/content/heise-creates-two-click-facebook-button-avoid- traffic-tracking-facebook-peeved)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> As the two FB engineers mentioned, you have to allow access to the app before it can know anything about you or take action on your behalf. See Step 2 of the Open Graph tutorial: [https://developers.facebook.com/docs/beta/opengraph/tutorial...](https://developers.facebook.com/docs/beta/opengraph/tutorial/)

Publishing actions requires the publish_actions permission, so if the app previously didn't ask for it, I believe you will be asked to re-authenticate the app with the new permissions.

I, for one, am going to be reviewing the apps I've previously added to ensure that none of them are doing anything I wouldn't want to. Not sure where to file FB API feature requests, but it would be nice to not have an "all or nothing" approach to authentication (this is a problem with the Twitter API as well, FWIW). For example, if an app requires X, Y and Z permissions, I might want to only allow X and Y and just not use the features that require Z.

<comment><USER55> Indeed there is a race condition (if that) where you have to allow access at the default privileges before opting out of any of them. I'm sure every single application sucks in your entire graph as soon as you click that button, so the solution to limit permissions after installing the app is just so much closing of the barn door after the horses have left.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> I guess, I should always browse Facebook in "Private Browsing" mode, without any other site open in that session.

</comment><comment><USER57> You can use this Chrome extension to kill cookies when logging out: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bgonpegbhnjepleakg...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bgonpegbhnjepleakgjdbaepkfedhhnf?hc=search&hcp=main)

</comment><comment><USER58> Another analysis/viewpoint: [https://plus.google.com/111297306144520956414/posts/JLQogwzo...](https://plus.google.com/111297306144520956414/posts/JLQogwzooYd)

</comment><comment><USER59> Anything that you don't want to be published on facebook, just don't do it on facebook. So that article you want to read privately, just go to news.google.com and read as much as you want. Don't use the facebook app for that. Same thing, if you want to listen to spotify, don't link it to your facebook account, etc...

This is how things have been for years, and if you are a more private person (like me), just reading news and listening to music "offline" and go to facebook when you feel like sharing.

</comment><comment><USER60> I've been in the process of minimizing my Facebook presence, but have left the account open just in case a specific need to use it arises in future. I'm already on other social networks, and Facebook is relatively high maintenance in terms of chasing privacy issues and dealing with other nonsense. For me the cost/benefit just isn't worth it, although I realize that this won't be the case for everyone.

</comment><comment><USER61> So it seems the solution would be to have different browser profiles. For instance, one for regular browsing, one for FB and one for gmail?

<comment><USER62> Flash cookies ("shared objects") are across shared across all browsers and browser profiles. If FB uses Flash cookies, you could log into FB on Firefox and they can still track you in Chrome!

<comment><USER61> scary...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Doesn't this 'frictionless' sharing have plenty of precedent online? Anyone can view the tunes I listen to on my Last.fm page, the pages I bookmark (visible by default) on Delicious. How are these social apps on Facebook different?

On the point of 'noise', both these examples provide ways of making sense of the streams. Last.fm charts, Delicious popular streams, and tags.

</comment><comment><USER64> Life is fine without Dorkbook. Never used it and hopefully never will, although it is getting harder and harder as my school has started to actively use it for e.g. communication regarding potential jobs for students and graduates in companies and institutions the school cooperates with.

</comment><comment><USER65> Wouldn't disabling third-party cookies take care of this? (And many other questionable things?)

<comment><USER66> In Chrome the option is to block 3rd party cookies from being set, not from being sent. Since Facebook sets its cookie while I am on their domain, I don't believe Chrome's blocking option is of any use.

<comment><USER67> In `about:flags` there's an option to change third-party cookie blocking behavior to prevent reading third-party cookies as well.

<comment><USER66> Cool, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> What most people fail to realize is this... Facebook is _not_ the product Facebook is trying to sell. YOU (and everything about your life!) are what Facebook wants to sell.

Facebook is the next great advertising platform, after Google.

</comment><comment><USER69> Am I the only person who has a virtual machine which is used only for Facebook?

<comment><USER70> The big question is, if you don't trust it, why use it at all?

<comment><USER69> Because people I know use it as a communication channel.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> <http://webgraph.com/resources/facebookblocker/>

<http://sharemenot.cs.washington.edu/>

</comment><comment><USER72> I've been ensuring I log out for quite a while now. I also have all platform functions disabled in my settings. It's all extra work though. There's a lot of friction involved in remaining private

</comment><comment><USER73> The latest url for app permissions is <http://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=applications>

</comment><comment><USER74> Don't log out, because logging out each time and logging back in is inconvenient. Use a tracker blocker instead - like Easy Privacy with Adblock Plus, or Ghostery.

</comment><comment><USER75> It's not about privacy. It's about _discretion_. Why is this hard to understand?

</comment><comment><USER76> One idly wonders if it is possible to turn the (to me) useless ticker feature off.

</comment><comment><USER77> Facebook needs to let you uncheck rights when you Connect to a site.

</comment><comment><USER78> ผมอยู่ในสมาคมแห่งการแบ่งปันและมีนํ้าใจแบ่งปันกับเพื่อนๆในfacebook

</comment><comment><USER79> My reply: [http://matjaz.posterous.com/why-you-should-log-in-to- faceboo...](http://matjaz.posterous.com/why-you-should-log-in-to-facebook)

</comment><comment><USER80> All the Facebook engineers on here sound like I imagine IBM executives do when asked about the involvement of IBM in the holocaust...

I'm genuinely surprised that the EU haven't stepped on Facebook yet. It's the creepiest, most invasive thing ever developed.

</comment><comment><USER81> Maybe because not everyone lives 10 minutes from each other and is 100% independently mobile? And gee... occasionally even people that you really enjoy spending time with have to move to other areas of the planet.

</comment><comment><USER82> Switch to other services (Instagram, Twitter, Google+). Problem solved.

Unless you like to be in S/M relationship. You're the S.

<comment><USER83> I think you got those mixed up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> This really comes down to Winer's tin foil hat obscuring what's actually happening and writing the story to reflect his lack of facts. For these "reading a story" posts to get to your timeline, you have to opt-in by installing the app and giving it permission to do that. If you're dumb enough to do that and get offended, maybe you should close your Facebook account.

<comment> X-Istence Some webapps require using Facebook to login to even create an account on their site.

Now you can say that then they shouldn't use said site, but soon this is going to become more and more common, what then?</comment></comment>


Book Summary: Radical Candor by Kim Scott - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EdWgZ-p6Gyi0_el7Hh96bogakvumly7b3T2JSk4Xu1M/edit?usp=sharing <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN. Wrote a pretty extensive summary of Kim Scott's Radical Candor.

The book has been by far the best I've read when it comes to the topic of building effective teams and relationships.

<comment><USER2> Great summary! This book has been collecting dust on mt shelf for some time, but I am now inspired to give it a read. I love the synthesis you have prepared here, and as a tech lead it was revelatory in many ways and makes me very grateful for the team I get to work with every day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I just read the whole thing and it was a very strange experience having 90 other people there while I was doing it, sort of like a library or something. At one point someone did a ctrl+a which startled me because I thought for a second I had to be careful not to press a button or I'd delete everything. Some people had been pointing out typos in the first couple of dozen pages but that stopped once you got further.

Oh and the document is quite a good summary, some points get repeated a lot but I guess they are very important. To be honest I'm not sure if these lessons do much for people once they reach a certain threshold, similar to reading about procrastination, it's interesting at first but then you know the concepts and the jargon is just shifting and all you need to do is apply them instead of reading yet another explanation of what monads are or whatever.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'll admit I decided against reading this after 'Silicon Valley' lampooned it. I wonder how many others did the same. May have to give it a proper look.

</comment><comment><USER5> Rad can</comment>


Kubernetes's days may be numbered as open source changes - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoworld.com/article/3204597/open-source-tools/kubernetes-days-may-be-numbered-as-open-source-changes.html <comment><USER2> To summarize: the article reaches a conclusion that's a complete opposite of its title.

<comment><USER3> Betteridge's Law lives to fight another day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14714733](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14714733)

In which, spoiler, I already posted some moderately salty remarks.</comment>


The Single Most Important Lesson from the 1918 Influenza - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-1918-spanish-flu.html <comment><AUTHOR> My paternal grandfather's parents died from the 1918 influenza, in Lithuania.</comment>


How Much Do You Spend on Energy? - <AUTHOR> Interested to hear how much people spend on (if any): Electricity Heating Fuels Gasoline/Diesel Others? <comment><USER2> Electricity is £10 a month and I'm in credit earning 3% interest in the balance.

Heating oil is 500 every 18 months but depends a lot on weather.

Virtually nothing on petrol as I rarely use the car these days.

</comment><comment><USER3> 0.25€ per kWh</comment>


Uber's Value to Riders Is Clear. To Investors, It May Prove More Elusive - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/22/business/dealbook/ubers-value-to-riders-is-clear-to-investors-it-may-prove-more-elusive.html?em_pos=small&emc=edit_dk_20161223&nl=dealbook&nl_art=17&nlid=65508833&ref=headline&te=1 <comment><USER2> The problem with this analysis is it's assuming that the elasticity of immediate demands is the same as long term. where customers may find alternatives that they couldn't find immediately. Also, surge pricing actually has higher demand at higher demand times. you can't surge price during off hours and expect to get the same result.</comment>


How To Devour Hacker News Articles - <AUTHOR> http://alecdibble.com/blog/2012/10/16/an-introduction-to-speed-reading

<comment><USER2> This is pretty cool. I will say that I read very fast and _do_ subvocalize, but I only subvocalize the major words in any paragraph.

<comment><AUTHOR> I used to do that as well, even after reading Kump's book. However, I found that once I stopped sub-vocalizing completely, I was much less likely to lose focus when I read dense material, regardless of the speed.</comment></comment>


The inventor of everything - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2014/4/14/5561250/cool-planet?

<comment><AUTHOR> This was submitted earlier today, but didn't get much traction: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7586285](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7586285)

The full title (which doesn't fit in 80 characters) explains the story better:

      The inventor of everything:
      How an egotistical genius convinced Silicon Valley to
      invest hundreds of millions in his shoddy science

It's an account of how Mike Cheiky, the founder of Cool Planet, has an almost uncanny ability to repeatedly raise large amounts of investment based on pseudoscience that doesn't ever pan out. It's one of the most negative pieces on a company that I've ever seen in print.

<comment><USER2> Very interesting read indeed. They guy seems to be trying to sell perpetuum mobile. I am amazed that large, well known companies invested in him. Did they failed to do proper research?

<comment><USER3> Good investors recognize that markets>technology. With enough time and money, virtually anything is possible. If Cool Planet does succeed, they will change the way the world uses energy. Chieky is definitely eccentric but he's no more of an a$$hole than Jobs was.

<comment><USER4> Markets are still susceptible to the laws of physics. "Virtually anything is possible" is a pretty meaningless statement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _" Cheiky's next plan to help mankind is a startup called V-Grid. As he explained in a YouTube clip, the company's goal is to revolutionize the electric grid, bringing cheap, renewable energy to millions around the world. The clip was pulled a few days before this story was published and edited to remove several seconds. In the original video, he claims to an audience of small investors that a team of backers, including Google, BP, and GE, and NorthBridge are already funding V-grid.

Cheiky says the because he secured a loan from Cool Planet to start V-grid, all the investors in one company are essentially backers in another. Yet when I asked those same investors if they had ever heard of or funded V-Grid, all adamantly and repeatedly denied it. But with the ink barely dry on Cool Planet's recent fundraising, Cheiky's already got another dream to sell, another round of investors to pitch. Seeing big-name backers already committed gives small investors confidence that someone has done due diligence on his claims."_

I'd be shocked to find that any clever lawyer can't find fraud in this...

<comment><USER6> The tone of the article comes off as character assassination, so there's likely to be suits regardless of merit either way.

Beyond that, I can't see how this is anything different than most any company: the boss has some grand vision and hands-on people make the hand-waiving into enough of an economic reality to keep said the company afloat. Moller has been promising flying cars since I could read Popular Mechanics. We need more crazy, enthusiastic fools to keep trying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> _" So, my approach in early-stage development is to cover a lot of ground with very little money by flying through the test process and only cherry-picking for the most interesting and promising candidates for further later-stage work," he wrote. "I contend that this is not bad science, it is simply a super lean management style to move the company forward very fast with limited resources."_

No wonder he's so successful - this is the sort of thing that will resonate perfectly with his target audience.

</comment><comment><USER8> I don't like the tone of the article much, there is an element of spite in it that would be better removed and replaced with on the record quotes. That said, there is clearly a lot of smoke here and possibly a fire.

There is a reason some people refer to certain suppliers of money as 'dumb capital'. Playing the game well and moving on before the inevitable collision with reality happens is a strategy that can work for a long time. This guy seems to be so good at it that it likely will never catch up with him.

I've met people like this, I've even worked for one or two.

It's scary how they can use a combination of charisma, drive and self delusion to relieve others (including their co-workers) of their contributions, line their pockets with cash and move on before the crash.

Which of course is never their fault because they've already moved on. And if the company is successful in spite of them then they get to claim the credit.

I'd like to see the substantiation of the claim that Wozniak used 'some of Ohio Scientifics technology'. That sounds like patent nonsense to me. They both used a 6502 but that was an inmos general purpose cpu, nothing specifically made for Ohio Scientific.

The Apple I was launched in '76 (also using the 6502), the II followed in '77\. The early ('75-'76) Ohio Scientific products were more along the lines of the KIM-I than the Apple I.

<comment><USER9> Inmos != MOS

<comment><USER8> You're absolutely right, have an upvote. I had transputers on the brain. That raspberry pi compute module has me re-visiting all kinds of old and interesting alleys. (See: [http://jacquesmattheij.com/raspberry-pi-as-a-poor- mans-trans...](http://jacquesmattheij.com/raspberry-pi-as-a-poor-mans- transputer) ).

<comment><USER10> Funny you should say that - I was just re-reading this: [http://www.cpushack.com/CPU/cpu7.html#Sec7Part5](http://www.cpushack.com/CPU/cpu7.html#Sec7Part5)

<comment><USER8> Cool :) I think the transputer was built before we were really ready for it, now that we've plucked all the low hanging fruit there may be a revival of ideas like these.

I wonder what the cost would be for implementing a transputer like architecture using the Rasberry Pi module.

It might be a very interesting alternative to the parallela.

[http://www.parallella.org/](http://www.parallella.org/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> His story resembles Ray Kurzweil's quite closely: an eccentric inventor with an extensive and impressive portfolio, parlaying his accomplishments into advocating shoddy pseudoscience. In Cheiky's case, Google is involved through their VC arm; in Kurzweil's case, he may or may not be doing research at Google.

<comment><USER12> except that Kurzweil actually makes stuff that actually works, again and again and again

<comment><USER13> That doesn't mean he's not prone to pseudoscientific thinking. The guy takes like 100 different vitamins a day in hopes of extending his life a few years. He promotes the idea that taking tons of vitamins can extend your life long enough to see the singularity, and sells vitamins through one of his companies. [https://www.rayandterry.com/](https://www.rayandterry.com/)

Maybe someone with medical training can tell me if I'm wrong. But as far as I know, otherwise healthy people won't get any benefits from taking massive amounts of vitamins daily.

<comment><USER14> I'm only 35 and I can remember when vitamins were unquestionably a great thing and everyone should take them.

Kellogg's still sells tons of cereals with those pointless vitamins mixed in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Fascinating. This reminded me greatly of yesterday's article on Shai Agassi and the failure of Better Place [0].

Both accomplished people, both were able to have brilliant ideas and ambitious plans, but when the rubber meets the road, they're delusional about the challenges they have and reject the reality that there are problems afoot.

I'm reminded of a quote: "Great entrepreneurs are stubborn contrarians and eternal optimists." [1] Maybe this stubbornness and optimism is exactly what leads them to build something great in the beginning, but also what leads them to ignore reality later on.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7584093](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7584093)

[1] [http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20131015141133-15...](http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20131015141133-15551421-great- entrepreneurs-are-stubborn-contrarians-and-eternal-optimists)

</comment><comment><USER16> Reminds me of Steorn Orbo[1] overunity generator. They created a lot of hype, managed to raise huge funding, and announced they'll be demoing Orbo at Kinetica Museum London (which didn't happen). Now they're selling their technology[2].

[1][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steorn](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steorn)

[2][http://www.steorn.com/orbo/](http://www.steorn.com/orbo/)

<comment><USER17> Yeah, I remember that fiasco. What a joke. Apparently they had a lot of scientists and engineers look at their stuff and it never passed muster.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The embedded Scribd presentation by Banholzer was very worthwhile.

</comment><comment><USER19> The claim being made is that Cheiky's ideas are nothing but pseudoscience, but the article seems to be saying that the companies he left behind are all still in business making real products. That's actually a pretty impressive track record. I would have thought it has to mean _some_ of his ideas worked out after all, even if most didn't (or his ideas had a solid core even if the more exaggerated claims had to be cut back, or some such). Is that not the case?

<comment><USER20> Company raises enormous funds based on someone's apparent brilliance who then leaves and the people find something our of the ideas to make a real company because they had a lot of money. If it works it's a reasonable plan. Given enough money, people can usually find a way to make something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > _"People always say it sounds too good to be true," says Wesley Chan, who > led Google Ventures' initial investment in Cool Planet. "That is exactly the > kind of company I get excited about as a venture capitalist. We're in the > business of making big bets."_

The bizarre logic in that quote made me think of this laugh from the Scorpio episode on The Simpsons: [http://www.snpp.com/episodes/3F23.html](http://www.snpp.com/episodes/3F23.html)

\</comment><comment> > Hank: Good afternoon, gentlemen. This is Scorpio. I have the Doomsday Device. You have 72 hours to deliver the gold or you'll face the consequences. And to prove I'm not bluffing, watch this.

> [activates a remote]

> [an explosion occurs near the UN building]

> Man 1: Oh, my God, the 59th Street bridge!

> Man 2: Maybe it just collapsed on its own.

> Man 1: We can't take that chance.

> Man 2: You always say that. I want to take a chance.

\</comment><comment>----

Also, anyway to validate Chelky's claim that Woz used his technology in building the Apple ][?

</comment><comment><USER22> Anyone got any more information on "Basically an iPad in 1981" \- the Ohio Computers Centerpoint?

</comment><comment><USER23> Sadly, (Cold) fusion seems to be in the same boat (see ecat etc.). People want to believe...

<comment><USER24> Oh, the e-cat. Should be known by now that Rossi cheated by using the ground wire to transfer the "heating" current...

Clever trick, I have to admit. Unless you knew the guy was cheating by abusing a safety feature in a way that no sane person ever should do, there was no way of proving the cheat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is the money quote;

"They have a lot of investment guys, who are like bankers, and they don't use their engineering talent to do due diligence."

</comment><comment><USER26> This guy should be Kickstarter's patron saint.</comment>


Microsoft announces new VR headsets for Windows 10, starting at $299 - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/26/13418156/microsoft-windows-10-holographic-virtual-reality-headset-announced-price <comment><USER2> This seems like a pretty big announcement and yet there's no real details. When is this shipping? What software is available? Weird.

</comment><comment><USER3> I was super excited to preorder an Oculus on the first day... until I saw the price. At a more reasonable price point, this is probably going to get me started on VR, finally. I know it won't be the "best" quality, but the market's too fluid to invest heavily in the high end immediately.

<comment><USER4> Likewise. I have phone-based VR and a beefy PC. The pricey headsets, limited content and exclusives for headsets have kept me out of the higher end. A friend (also a dev) and I were just chatting yesterday that we'd get hololens and attempt to write apps with it - were it not for the insane price (especially after I wasted almost 2K on Google's Glass debacle). A lower price point and wide availability across vendors might mean fewer exclusives and that is great for the whole industry.

Incidently, I thought Google was doing a good job with the Google VR SDK. But I now am very skeptical since it appears (just my humble, personal opinion) they are more focused on their Daydream platform than they are on wide availability across vendor devices.

<comment><USER3> Yeah. For $299, I can buy a headset with the knowledge I'm gonna replace it soon. But if I buy an $800 headset, it has to do EVERYTHING.

I did Glass too, and again, HoloLens outpriced my acceptable "stupid expense to be on the leading edge" budget. :D

<comment><USER5> Buying nextstep on intel (I think it was os 3.3, it cost like $800) was the last big thing I invested in that turned out to be a big mistake, but I'm lucky :-) I happened to think google glass would never go anywhere but that was lucky too. Probably most developers never have been nextstep running (except on a mac ;-)).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does anyone have a link to the demo video? This video refers to the first, but doesn't have much useful info in it.

<comment><USER7> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqXo7pKJGtU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqXo7pKJGtU)

<comment><USER8> Man was that ever boring. I was expecting some Direct3D or XBox integration, like a Forza game or something.

Between the stale demo, the lack of technical details, and no release date, I wouldn't be surprised if the headset doesn't actually work all that well yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> wonder if there is something similar for linux?

<comment><USER10> mmm, maybe the HTC Vive?

<comment><USER11> SteamVR does not support Linux yet.</comment></comment></comment>


Your FAQ could be answering 40% of support requests and save you 8 hrs/mo - <AUTHOR> http://blog.uservoice.com/entries/40-percent-of-your-customer-service-emails-could-be-answered-by-FAQ <comment><USER3> Lots and lots of people don't read FAQs. They don't even read instructions on how to download something or register software, they just write to support ("where is my product?"), so my advice is: FIX YOUR SOFTWARE.

Example:

BlogJet (blog client I wrote) required entering XML-RPC endpoint URL for a blog to create an account. Of course, few people knew the endpoint URL for their blogging engine, so 80% of support requests were customers asking for help on configuring their blog. FAQ didn't help (yes, I tried); the solution was to automatically detect XML-RPC endpoint URL from their blog's URL. After I did this, the percentage of such support requests dramatically dropped.

The next 80% was customers asking to resend their registration keys. I just wrote a system to automatically resend them, so people no longer wrote to me, they just filled a form and received a key.

The next 80%... The point is, find those 80% identical support requests, fix your software or add automation to eliminate them, then repeat. Most questions that can be answered by FAQ are things you can fix in software.

As for the system where customers enter their question and get redirected to the related question in the FAQ (see Wordpress.com, Google) -- people _hate_ this, just like they hate browsing phone support systems looking for a way to contact a real person.

<comment><USER4> We totally agree. That's why we automatically pull up related FAQs but don't pull the customer away from their flow of writing a message to you. We've found it works quite well, as demonstrated by the numbers. It's not annoying like the latter system you mentioned, but surfaces those FAQs that could have helped with that 80%.

-Evan Hamilton Community Manager, UserVoice

<comment><USER3> I just watched your demo video, and the system looks nice and very useful, unlike those I wrote about in the last paragraph -- customers instantly see the answer to their question without interruption.

<comment><USER4> Thanks! We hate being interrupted too, so we are very sensitive to that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Papering over user support with an FAQ is addressing the symptom, not the problem. You should consider an FAQ to be a stop gap, until you fix your bad software. Example:

We get a request or two per week in Gaia GPS for people asking "How to I delete a waypoint?" and other people seem to search for "Gaia GPS delete waypoint" on Google too. To do this, you swipe the row of the waypoint to be deleted in a table view, and a delete button appears. This is how the native iPhone email works.

We describe how to do this in a page in our help describing hard-to-find- features (the top page in our Help manual even). But really, we need to make it more obvious to everyone how to do it.

To solve this problem, we changed the software this release to add a delete option to the details page of each object. When this is approved, I imagine all the support will disappear.

<comment><USER4> Agreed that you should be making your product better...I think that's perhaps the unsung goal with our reporting system. If an article gets read a lot, look at how you can improve it in your product.

But you can't fix things fast enough and there will always be someone confused (If you build it one day, user X will be confused. Build it another, user Y will be confused.) so having good documentation is key, in our opinion.

<comment><USER5> I also disagree with this assertion - "If you build it one day, user X will be confused. Build it another, user Y will be confused."

I agree that you can never make a product that 100% of people can use with ease, but you can get close, and you can make changes that help User X without alienating User Y.

Case in point: iPads don't come with instruction manuals, and toddlers and old people both use them with ease.

<comment><USER6> _Case in point: iPads don't come with instruction manuals, and toddlers and old people both use them with ease._

Although it took me nearly an hour to figure out how to copy some videos I had transcoded to the device.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "You give the same answer you always give. Another 5 minutes of your (and your customer's) life wasted."

For _certain types of businesses_ having the customer send you an email that you have to respond to (and we use auto complete emails so they are knocked out in < 30 seconds) is a great opportunity to try to sell them something else or even answer a survey question etc.

After all companies do all sorts of things to get customer interaction. There is nothing better than building customer loyalty (once again depending on the particular situation) by using this as a way to send a seemingly personal response which _someone will definitely be reading_ and not ignoring like a sales email. Even if you are not selling anything there is a value to that.

<comment><USER8> > _having the customer send you an email [...] is a great opportunity to try > to sell them something else or even answer a survey question etc._

Wow. That wouldn't go down well with me.

<comment><USER7> Are you sure?

What's wrong with showing an extra line saying, for example, "by the way did you know that we also offer site monitoring which you can get for an additional $ per month"?

It's similar to the viral marketing that started with the "get your own free email at hotmail.com" as a result of Tim Draper's suggestion...

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_C._Draper>

<comment><USER8> I want you to fix my problem. If something is broken enough that I need to contact you then, in my mind, your only priority is to get me working again.

Associating your other products with the faults I've found in the product I'm using might be a sub-optimal marketing strategy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Shoddy math. You can't take the average time to answer a customer inquiry and then assume that reducing the number of inquiries will reduce your work load by that much. The questions that can be answered by a good FAQ are precisely those questions that can be handled quickly.

In other words, it overestimates the time savings from having an FAQ.

<comment><USER4> You have a point about the actual amount of time saved, but there are plenty of questions that are very complex that can be answered by a good FAQ.

For example: we offer Single Sign-On for UserVoice. If we didn't have any documentation at all about it, we'd spend many, many more hours answering basic questions like "how do I set up SSO?", "how can I encrypt my JSON token?", etc. Yes, we still have to answer specific questions that can't be anticipated by an FAQ, but we've saved ourselves many hours with this documentation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> _So why the hell are we still wasting time responding to the same damn questions?_

Because customers never read anyway.

<comment><USER11> I write the FAQs for the company I work for and believe me, they do. Not all of them of course, but I've seen enough visitor stats, search queries (with and without results) and emails to know that some of your clients _will_ go out of their way to look for the answer online before emailing.

Customers will give up if a) the FAQs or help system isn't easily reachable, or b) if the FAQs and help system sucks.

The best thing you can do if "people don't read the FAQs" isn't to trash them - _it's to make them better_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I worked email support for a website once upon a time. I'm pretty sure 40% of the emails were "I forgot my password", despite a large "Forgot Your Password?" link on the top of every page next to the login box. And this was a rather technically-oriented website, too; most of these people had to be fairly tech-savvy to even be using the site in the first place. If those people can't read the site enough to find a link in the obvious place, my hopes of getting anybody to read a FAQ are not very high.

<comment><USER13> The problem is that people aren't perceiving the link to be applicable to their situation for whatever reason. A better solution rather than investing more time in handling emails would be to alter the message the user sees when they get the login wrong:

"Invalid username and/or password. Would you like us to reset your password for you? [button: YES, reset my password]"

If the user simply mistyped their password they can ignore the prompt and try again. If they click the YES button, direct them to a page that has the email address they entered pre-populated and a "Reset My Password" button with clear instructions elsewhere on what to do. For example, an arrow to the email field with instructions on ensuring the email address is correct; another arrow to the button with instructions to click there. Clicking on the button then shows "We have sent an email to <your email address>. Please follow the instructions contained in the email to reset your password." The email would contain a link with a time-expiring token that, when clicked, lets them specify their new password.

With that approach you could have reduced those types of emails to mostly situations where the user did not get the email.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm working to help improve <http://dropbox.com/help>

It is a lot more than a FAQ: it has a somewhat good search feature, and also directs users to an intro tour, the forums, and votebox (a place to request and discuss features).

Improving it is a bit more complicated than just getting analytics around how many hits on /help end up searching, reading help articles, and maybe filing tickets. There is a lot more needed to understand which areas of the help center aren't getting enough prominence, which topics are just missing, and also how we could create some automated tools to help people find sources of problems. For example, if you are over quota, we should tell you that prominently on /help. Getting automated feedback on search results (clicks on help articles increasing their rank for a given query), and also from ticket responses (the article which would have answered the question needs higher rank for the original query) is a huge area of potential improvement, but both require a fair amount of work.

The potential impact is actually huge: would we need to double the size of the support team if we double the userbase (yet again)? If you're interested in hearing more about this, and especially if you've like to help build these systems, shoot me an email: firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER4> Very cool stuff, Ivan! Looks like we're fighting the same fight. :) Keep it up!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is there a good equivalent to UserVoice for internal helpdesks? (Or is UserVoice flexible enough to work well in an internal situation?)

This kind of "pull up a FAQ while the user enters a ticket" tech could work incredibly well for fortune 500 companies, schools, universities, etc.

<comment><USER4> Currently we don't have a private version of Helpdesk, but it is something we're considering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This would be fantastic in an environment where you have a consumer base - <USER2> we're still trying to solve the problem where we have a huge amount of technical information for our professional customers and it's difficult to find - even for our support staff as some issues only come up rarely and we forget where we put the solution.

We're actively looking for this solution if anyone has something that would fit this need.

</comment><comment><USER17> That is an example of a great headline. It's amazing how effective good copy writing is.</comment>