Tired of waiting for Google to release a proper Latitude API, I went ahead and scribbled latitude2brightkite.sh – a script that checks-in your Google Latitude position to Brightkite using the Brightkite REST API and the Google Public Location Badge. See my seminal post from yesterday for more information about how I cobbled it together.

Since yesterday I cleaned it up a little, but most of all, as promised, I made it more intelligent by having it compare the current position with the last one, in order to check-in with Brightkite only if the Google Latitude position has changed. Not checking-in at each invocation will certainly reduce the number of check-ins by 99% – and I’m sure that Brightkite will be thankful for the lesser load on their HTTP servers…

So grab the code for latitude2brightkite.sh, put it in your crontab and have more fun with Brightkite and Google Latitude !

There is quite a bit of interest for this script – it seems that I have filled a widely felt need.

Tired of waiting for Google to release a proper Latitude API, I went ahead and scribbled latitude2brightkite.sh – a script that checks-in your Google Latitude position to Brightkite using the Brightkite REST API and the Google Public Location Badge.

This script is an ugly mongrel hack, but that is what you get when an aged script kiddie writes something in a hurry. The right way to do it would be to parse Latitude’s JSON output cleanly using the Perl library. But that dirty prototype took me all of ten minutes to set up while unwinding between meetings, and it now works fine in my crontab.

Apart from Bash, the requirements to run this script are the Perl JSON library (available in Debian as libjson-perl) and Curl.

The main limitation of this script is that your Google Public Location Badge has to be enabled and it has to show the best available location. This means that for this script to work, your location has to be public. The privacy conscious among my readers will surely love it !

This script proves that automatic Google Latitude position check-in in Brightkite can be done, it works for me, and the official Google Latitude API will hopefully soon make it obsolete !

Meanwhile, grab the code for latitude2brightkite.sh, put it in your crontab and have more fun with Brightkite and Google Latitude… To me, this is what both services were missing to become truly usable.

Of course, doing it with “XEP-0080 – User Location” via publish-subscribe (“XEP-0080 – PubSub” would make much more sense than polling an HTTP server all the time, but we are not there yet. Meanwhile this script could be made more intelligent by only checking in with Brightkite if the Google Latitude position has changed. I’ll think about it for the next version…

If you want to skip the making-of story, you can go straight to the laconica2IRC.pl script download. Or in case anyone is interested, here is the why and how…

Some of my best friends are die-hard IRC users that make a point of not touching anything remotely looking like a social networking web site, especially if anyone has ever hinted that it could be tagged as “Web 2.0” (whatever that means). As much as I enjoy hanging out with them in our favorite IRC channel, conversations there are sporadic. Most of the time, that club house increasingly looks like an asynchronous forum for short updates posted infrequently on a synchronous medium… Did I just describe microblogging ? Indeed it is a very similar use case, if not the same. And I don’t want to choose between talking to my close accomplices and opening up to the wider world. So I still want to hang out in IRC for a nice chat from time to time, but while I’m out broadcasting dents I want my paranoid autistic friends to get them too. To satisfy that need, I need to have my IRC voice say my dents on the old boys channel.

The data source could be an OpenMicroblogging endpoint, but being lazy I found a far easier solution : use Laconi.ca‘s Web feeds. Such solution looked easier because there are already heaps of code out there for consuming Web feeds, and it was highly likely that I would find one I could bend into doing my bidding.

To talk on IRC, I had previously had the opportunity to peruse the Net::IRC library with great satisfaction – so it was an obvious choice. In addition, in spite of being quite incompetent with it, I appreciate Perl and I was looking for an excuse to hack something with it.

With knowledge of the input, the output and the technology I wanted to use, I could start implementing. Being lazy and incompetent, I of course turned to Google to provide me with reusable code that would spare me building the script from the ground up. My laziness was of course quick to be rewarded as I found rssbot.pl by Peter Baudis in the public domain. That script fetches a RSS feed and says the new items in an IRC channel. It was very close to what I wanted to do, and it had no exotic dependancies – only Net::IRC library (alias libnet-irc-perl in Debian) and XML::RSS (alias libxml-rss-perl in Debian).

So I set upon hacking this script into the shape I wanted. I added IRC password authentication (courtesy of Net::IRC), I commented out a string sanitation loop which I did not understand and whose presence cause the script to malfunction, I pruned out the Laconi.ca user name and extraneous punctuation to have my IRC user “say” my own Identi.ca entries just as if I was typing them myself, and after a few months of testing I finally added an option for @replies filtering so that my IRC buddies are not annoyed by the noise of remote conversations.

I wanted my own IRC user “say” the output, and that part was very easy because I use the Bip an IRC proxy which supports multiple clients on one IRC server connection. This script was just going to be another client, and that is why I added password authentication. Bip is available in Debian and is very handy : I usually have an IRC client at home, one in the office, occasionally a CGI-IRC, rarely a mobile client and now this script – and to the dwellers of my favorite IRC channel there is no way to tell which one is talking. And whichever client I choose, I never missing anything thanks to logging and replay on login. Screen with a command-line IRC client provides part of this functionality, but the zero maintainance Bip does so much more and is so reliable that one has to wonder if my friends cling to Irssi and Screen out of sheer traditionalism.

All that remained to do was to launch the script in a sane way. To control this sort of simple and permanently executed piece of code and keep it from misbehaving, Daemon is a good way. Available in Debian, Daemon proved its worth when the RSS file went missing during the Identi.ca upgrade and the script crashed everytime it tried to access it for lack of exception catching. Had I simply put it in an infinite loop, it would have hogged significant ressources just by running in circles like a headless chicken. Daemon not only restarted it after each crash, but also killed it after a set number of retries in a set duration – thus preventing any interference with the rest of what runs on our server. Here is the Daemon launch command that I have used :

#!/bin/bash
path=/usr/local/bin/laconica2IRC
daemon -a 16 -L 16 -M 3 -D $path -N -n laconica2IRC_JML -r -O $path/laconica2IRC.log -o $path/laconica2IRC.log $path/laconica2IRC.pl

And that’s it… Less cut and paste from Identi.ca to my favorite IRC channel, and my IRC friends who have not yet adopted microblogging don’t feel left out of my updates anymore. And I can still jump into IRC from time to time for a real time chat. I have the best of both worlds – what more could I ask ?

Sounds good to you ? Grab the laconica2IRC.pl script !

A year ago this day, Facebook announced “Right now we’re building a Jabber/XMPP interface for Facebook Chat. In the near future, users will be able to use Jabber/XMPP-based chat applications to connect to Facebook Chat“. The news has been greeted positively in various places everywhere.

A year later, strictly nothing happened, and that silence has not gone unnoticed. Facebook has not even issued the slightest announcement, except a wishlist bug report comment by Charlie Cheever mentioning that “some people are working on this.  It will probably be done in a few months. Sorry the timeline isn’t more clear“.

Is that all that a major player such as Facebook can do to interoperate with the rest of the instant messaging world ? Words with no deeds to back them up are very disappointing, especially from a player with ample means. Annoucements followed by complete silence are an even bigger blow to anyone’s credibility. Will Facebook step up to the plate ?

By federating with the rest of the XMPP world and especially with Google Talk, Facebook has an opportunity to make a huge splash in instant messaging in a rare case where their interests are aligned with their user’s. Why the silence ?

Maybe I should not be using Facebook at all. But it has been so successful at attracting the family, the non-geeks and the girls that I have settled for the compromise of using it while serving some constructive criticism. But I feel better at Identi.ca and Friendfeed…

One of the benefits of running blogs is the ability to gather traffic statistics and spot emerging trends. The popularity of an article is an interesting information, but my favorite is the key phrases in search engine referrer URL. The key phrases tell us what people were looking for when they ended up on the site.

This month, “Facebook application spam and how to block it” is the most viewed page on this blog, surpassing the apparently very useful mod_proxy tip, the always popular Openoffice outline mode and even the American craze for that French soldier in Afghanistan.

This month also, “block facebook quizzes” and all variations thereof account for an overwhelming majority of search engine referer key phrases on this blog.

I had personal and anecdotal data about the flood of obnoxious simplistic Facebook personality tests, but now I have numbers to back it up.

I predict a bright future for the One-Click Quiz Blocker Facebook application : it is the easiest way to make the newsfeed clean and useful again. It does what it says – it just works and it takes just one click : a real pleasure compared to my former obsessive-compulsive habit of systematic manual blocking (about five hundreds in three years…).

I sometimes get requests for help. Often they are smart questions and I’m actually somewhat relevant to them – for example questions about a script or an article that I wrote, or an experience I had. But sometimes it is not the case. This message I received today is particularly bad, so I thought it might be a public service to share it as an example of what not to do. This one is especially appalling because it comes not from some wet-behind-the-ears teenager to whom I would gracefully have issued a few hints and a gentle reminder of online manners, but from the inside of the corporate network of Wipro – a company that has a reputation as a global IT services organization.

From: xxxxxx.kumar@wipro.com
Subject: Perl
To: jim@liotier.org
Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2009 16:22:32 +0530

Hi Jim,

Could you please help me in finding out the solution for my problem. Iam new to perl i have tried all the options whatever i learned but couldn’t solve. Please revert me if you know the solution.

Here is the problem follows:

Below is the XML in which you could see the lines with AssemblyVersion and Version in each record i need to modify these values depending on some values which i get from perforce. Assuming hardcode values as of now need to change those values upon user wish using Perl. Upon changing these lines it should effect in existing file .

<FileCopyInfo>
<Entries>
<Entry>
<DeviceName>sss</DeviceName>
<ModuleName>general1</ModuleName>
<AssemblyVersion>9</AssemblyVersion>
<Language>default</Language>
<Version>9</Version>
<DisplayName>Speech – eneral</DisplayName>
<UpdateOnlyExisting>false</UpdateOnlyExisting>
</Entry>
<Entry>
<DeviceName>sss</DeviceName>
<ModuleName>general2</ModuleName>
<AssemblyVersion>9</AssemblyVersion>
<Language>default</Language>
<Version>9</Version>
<DisplayName>Speech – recog de_DE</DisplayName>
<UpdateOnlyExisting>false</UpdateOnlyExisting>
</Entry>
</Entries>
</FileCopyInfo>

Thanks & Regards,
Xxxxxxx

From what I gather from the convoluted use of approximative English, the problem is about changing the value of two XML elements in a file. Can anyone believe that this guy has even tried to solve this simple problem on his own ? It is even sadder that he tries to obtain answers by spamming random strangers by mail, soliciting answers that will never be shared with the wider world. Least he could have done is posting his message on a Perl forum so that others with similar questions can benefit from the eventual answer.

Had he performed even a cursory Google search, he would have found that one of his compatriots has done exactly that and gotten three different answers to a similar question, letting him choose between XML::Twig, XML::Rules and XML::Simple. These are just three – but the Perl XML FAQ enumerates at least a dozen CPAN modules for manipulating XML data. The documentation for any of them or the examples in the FAQ would also have put him on the track to a solution.

Everyone can be clueless about something and learning is a fundamental activity for our whole lives. But everyone can do some research, read the FAQ, ask smart questions and make sure that the whole community benefits from their learning process, especially as it doe not cost any additional effort. Knowledge capitalization within a community of practice is such an easy process with benefits for everyone involved that I don’t understand why it is not a universally drilled reflex.

The funny part is that while I’m ranting about it and wielding the cluebat over the head of some random interloper, I realize that the same sort of behavior is standard internally in a very large company I know very well, because a repository of community knowledge has not even been made available for those willing to share. Is there any online community without a wiki and a forum ?

Ten years ago I was beginning to believe that consulting opportunities in knowledge management were drying up because knowledge management skills had entered the mainstream and percolated everywhere. I could not be more wrong : ten years of awesome technological progress have proved beyond reasonable doubt that technology and tools are a peripheral issue : knowledge management is about the people and their attitudes; it is about cooperation. This was the introduction of my graduation paper ten years ago, with the prisoner’s dilemma illustrating cooperation issues – and it is today still as valid as ever.

Chat is supposed to be realtime conversation – and it often is. But just as some corporate victims live in Outlook (that abortion that Microsoft shoves down user’s throat as an excuse for a mail client) some fellow geeks live with an IRC screen at hand. Those people use IRC for realtime conversation, but not only. Soliloquy is widespread, and having a client with at least half a dozen tabs that are as many parallel conversations is a common occurence. IRC users were microblogging before the term was coined and web interfaces imagined.

People come to IRC channels such as project channels to meet the whole group. But just as often they come there to hang out with acquaintances, which they find spread accross various channels. Wouldn’t it be great if each user could have his own channel with just his friends ? This is what microblogging is : a people aggregator, just as any feed aggregator but for the people you want to follow.

I have had a hard time so far trying to convince my IRC addicted friends that we should use a Jabber MUC chat room in lieu of our usual IRC channel. Jabber MUC is superior to IRC in every way possible, but as much as we like to rail against the common user’s inertia to technological adoption, we are sometimes no better.

I believe that the problem was that Jabber MUC provides only marginal incremental improvement to their usage. And adopting a microblogging service is a huge stretch from their current use cases. I have therefore long been dreaming about a chat interface to microblogging that would meld the social power of microblogging and common chat usage patterns into a workable migration path for my IRC addicted friends. And there it is :

Neat isn’t it ? Jack Moffit mentioned it evasively in his article about filtering the realtime web and it piqued my curiosity.

From a user’s point of view, Identichat is about joining the Jabber multi-user chat at your_identica_user_name@identichat.prosody.im and you’ll immediately find yourself in a standard MUC room where the participants are your Identi.ca subscribers. The conversation is the microblogging stream that you would normally get at Identi.ca.

If you try to enter a notice, a help message in the chat window points out that ‘You can register using your identica account by sending !register username password’. Do that – not ‘/register’ as I mistakenly typed out of IRC habit – and you are set to use Identi.ca as any chat tool.

How is that different from a graphical Laconica client ? It is not a Laconica client, it is plain XMPP MUC that about every decent XMPP client supports. As you may know, there are Jabber clients for about every platform you can imagine including mobiles – even some like Mcabber which provide a user interface which will make the console IRC user feel at home. Identichat is not just another client, it is a gateway to a whole world of existing XMPP clients so that every user can use his favorite.

Identichat will help Laconica by eroding chat user’s resistance to change. And it could also foster new uses of microblogging as a thick client enables considerably accelerated interaction compared to a web interface. For now it could be faster – the turnaround latency is perceptible compared to IRC or XMPP MUC, and a helpful “line too long” message would be better than “Send failed : error 406”. But I’m nitpicking : Identichat is a wonderful tool that gives new faces to the microblogging infrastructure. An infrastructure that can show different faces to different classes of users has a great future !

Amanda Mooney remarks that :

Actually it was always like that, but slower and invisible. Original ideas are few because similar inputs through similar individuals generate similar outputs – the same problems with the same environment and the same tools handled by people who share backgrounds produce the same conclusions. So it is not surprising that concepts are invented simultaneously and reinvented all the time. I don’t feel belittled by finding out that I’m not unique – on the contrary : I feel empowered by finding that I’m not isolated anymore. I remember lounging in libraries in my youth, reading esoteric technical books chosen at random. I often resented not being able to share that with people who have similar interests. Now we can find each other easily and all be surfing together at the wavefront. Childhood dreams came true – life is good !

But if you anguish about being a unique snowflake just like all the other unique snowflakes, there is still hope for you. Our mental agility and cultural maleability suffer from a rather heavy inertia, so the processing stage is not readily manipulable. That leaves only the input to be tinkered with in the short term – and you can play with inputs a lot ! This is why it is important to cultivate diversity in your social network, and it is also why adding some noise into your web feeds is good for you. Who is not addicted to new stimuli ?

Google Trend reports that the country where Google searches for the word “friendfeed” most frequently originate is Iran. Is FriendFeed very popular in Iran ? Can anyone explain that surprising piece of data ? I stumbled upon it today and it puzzled me enough to warrant some more research.

Google Trend results for “Friendfeed” today :

Givent that the queries originate mostly in Iran – by a wide margin, it is strange that the most used languages for those searches is English, because Google does have its user interface translater in Persian. A similar phenomenon does not appear for Facebook : there is apparently quite a craze about Facebook in Turkey, and the most used languages in those searches is therefore Turkish.

Google Trend results for “Facebook” today :

As a counterpoint, searches for “Myspace” originate mostly in the USA with English as a language. That is more like what I expected before writing this article.

Google Trend results for “Myspace” today :

Alexa data for Myspace matches the Google Trend results pretty well.

Alexa data shows that FriendFeed traffic originating from Iran is one fourth of what originates from the USA :

Proportionally to population and Internet usage penetration, that is quite a large proportion of FriendFeed users in Iran.

But the Alexa data for Facebook does not match the Google Trends result : it does not even mention Turkey in the top countries of origin – the USA are first, followed by a bunch of western countries.

We could have the following conclusions :

• Myspace is a mostly American site
• Turkish are curious about Facebook but actually use Friendfeed
• Iran are not only curious about Friendfeed but also use it like crazy

Is Robert Scoble secretly dealing with the Pasdaran ? Is there a character set issue that screws up the whole statistics because we are ISO-8859-1 biased ? I have no idea, but I have a feeling that I have barely scratched the surface of the issue and there are certainly plenty of unexpected findings to be discovered about who is using which social site.

Have you tried one more time to convince you parents to switch to web feeds to get updates from the family ? Do you cringe when you see your colleague clumsily wade through a collections of sites main pages instead of having them aggregated in a single feed ? Or did your technophobe girlfriend miss the latest photo album you posted ? With a wide variety of source acknowledging that web feeds ans web feeds readers being perceived as too technical, many of us have scaled back this particular evangelization effort to focus it on users ripe for transitionning from basic to advanced  tools.

Breaking through that resistance outright is beyond our power, but we can get around it. Electronic mail is a mature tool with well understood use cases with which even the least competent users feels comfortable thanks to how easily it maps with the deeply assimilated physical mail model. This is why Louis Gray has started mailing Google Reader items to promote the use of that web feed reader. But we can do better than that by building a fully automated bridge from web feed to email.

Our hope for plugging the late adopters into the information feeds is named rss2email. As its name suggests, Aaron Swartz’s GPL-licensed rss2email utility converts RSS subscriptions into email messages and sends them to whatever address you specify. Despite the name, it handles Atom feeds as well, so you should be able to use it with just about any feed you like. And of course rss2email is available from Debian.

The nice introduction to rss2email by Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier is all the documentation you need – and rss2email is so simple that you probably don’t even need that. I now have some of my favorite late adopters each plugged into his custom subset of my regular information distribution feeds. The relevant news stories get mailed to them without me having to even think about it. And the best part is that they now read them !

I have become a user of Brightkite, a service that provides situational awareness in the geographical context. Once its relationship to user location information sources such as Fire Eagle improve, it may become a very nice tool, especially in mobile use cases where location reporting may be partly automated.

But even if they add technical value in the growing world of geographically aware applications, theses services are actually not innovative at the functional level. For example, in the ham radio universe, APRS is already a great system for real time tactical digital communications of information of immediate value in the local area – which includes among other things the position of the participating stations. And there is also TCAS, which interrogates surrounding aircrafts about their positions, and AIS which broadcasts ship positions and enables the entertaining Vessel Traffic Services such as the one provided by MarineTraffic. All these radio based systems broadcast in the clear and are not satisfying the privacy requirements of a personal eventing service. But that problem has also been solved by the Blue Force Tracker which even though it is still a work in progress has already changed how a chaotic battlefield is perceived by its participants.

“Where am I, and where are my friends ?” is not only the soldier’s critical information – it is also an important component of our social lives, witness the thriving landscape of geosocial networking. Geographic location is a fundamental enabler : we are physically embodied and the perimeter of location based services actually encompasses anything concerning our physical presence. So we can’t let physical location services escape our control. Fire Eagle may be practical for now, but we need to make geographical information part of the basic infrastructure under our control and available on a standardized, open and decentralized basis. The good news is that much thoughts have already been invested into that problem.

Physical location is part of our presence, and as you may have guessed by now, this means XMPP comes to the rescue ! We have XEP-0080 – User Location, an XMPP extension which is currently a XMPP Foundation Draft Standard (implementations are encouraged and the protocol is appropriate for deployment in production systems, but some changes to the protocol are possible before it becomes a Final Standard – as good as a draft standard RFC and therefore good enough for early adopter use). It is meant to be communicated and transported by means of Publish-Subscribe or the subset thereof specified in Personal Eventing via Pubsub. It may also be provided as an extension of plain vanilla <presence/> but that is quite a crude way to do it compared to the Publish-Subscribe goodness.

The rest of the work is left to the XMPP client. Of course, the client can show them on a map, just as Brightkite currently does. But I can also easily imagine an instant messaging contact list on my PDA where one of the contact groups is “contacts near me”. I would love to have Psi do that…

Some people notice I am quite dogmatic about open networks. And they are right : to me, open is everything and the rest is details. But even my zeal has its limits : I don’t gratuitously shove tools in the face of people who can’t use them in practical conditions. I have been advocating jabber among my technically minded friends since 2001 and running my own server since 2003, but it took Google joining the XMPP network in 2006 to actually make it a viable option for pushing open instant messaging to the masses of people I don’t want to support myself. Before that I could understand the necessity for joining proprietary networks and run multiprotocol clients to reach people I could not decently drag to Jabber or IRC. But now I can tell them that getting presence information and instant messenging from me is just a Google account away – and since it is a mainstream service offered by an established and well known service provider they can hardly anymore label me a techno-excentric for using it. So – no I will not join your proprietary instant messaging network.

Today we have the same situation with social networking. And while the technological prerequisites for open microblogging have been almost there for a while, they have not yet cristalized into something that can be fed to the masses. That day will come – and we are all pushing toward it. Until then, I have a Facebook profile. But soon I know that I’ll be able to tell the world that my social networking tool is my blog, or whatever other tools I fancy moving to and from thanks to data portability efforts. And it’ll be easy for others to do the same because interoperable services will blossom at the hands of mass-market providers – maybe even Facebook if they ever reach enlightenment. And when that is about to be ready for massive adoption, you know where I’ll be – and you know where I’ll not be anymore !

To me there is an element of religion in those choices. But the techno-apathetic average user can make the same choices out of pure self-interest. If there are a number of comparable offerings on the market, one of which lets the buyer choose between different suppliers and move between them at will, you can bet that the one-time cost of moving away from the proprietary offering will be more than offset by the future value of the open solution. If we look at the history of technologies, examples of such migrations are plenty. Let’s just take e-mail for example : what is the current weight of closed mail systems ? They still exist, but they are insignificant niches and many of them use e-mail for notification…

With the profusion of tools, our online presence is all over the place… Here is a quick tour of where fragments of me can be found. I’m focusing on tools – I won’t list mere static pages (of which I still have a few dusty instances in various aging places). The goal of this article is to draw a quick taxonomy of the tools I’m using.

My original content publication outlets :

• My english speaking blog
• My french speaking blog
• My link blog
• My bookmarks
• My Photo Gallery
• My family blog
• My other family blog
• My favorite daily reads

Places where I echo my own content web feeds, track people and engage actively:

• Facebook
• Identi.ca
• FriendFeed
• Flickr

Places where I track people and participate :

• LinkedIn
• Brightkite
• Last.fm

Places where I infrequently participate :

• Dopplr
• Digg
• Stumbleupon

Places where I just echo my own content web feeds and/or status messages in case people there are tracking me there :

• Plurk
• Plaxo
• Rejaw
• Tumblr
• Technorati
• Kwippy
• Bebo
• Hi5
• Storytlr
• Koornk
• Multiply
• Swurl
• YouAre

Not only is this list not exhaustive, but I have not even bothered to count the forums and blogs where I lurk or contribute comments. Don’t think that I’m a normal user though : maintaining a watch over online tools is part of my trade, so I’m the sort of person who’ll create an account on every site in sight if just to take a look at it.

But in any case, the profusion is food for thought about meta-tools.

While FriendFeed is the efficient geek hangout, it is Facebook that provides the social middle ground that bridges the gap between early adopters and the mainstream. What makes Facebook useful is that it attracts mainstream users and entices to publish content – something most of them would never do anywhere else. As Regular Geek puts it : “These are people who thought AOL was the internet“. They only visit a few mainstream sites and to them the Web is almost as read-only as dead tree media. That Facebook manages to turn them painlessly into content producers makes it useful for keeping in touch with everyone who does not know what web feeds are. Be aware that even though Facebook is not a dedicated photo sharing site, it beats them at their own game : with ten billion pictures posted, it is now the site with the most pictures shared.

But with mainstream users comes much cluelessness. Those are the people who mindlessly click the default option on every pop-up dialog in sight and then bring you malware ridden computers for healing while wondering why it is so slow and whether they should buy a new one – all they get from me nowadays is a kind word, an Ubuntu CD and offer to install it. Those users have shown time and time again how the path of least social resistance leads to a torrent of application spam.

Some applications such as are a useful addition to the social framework – among them I particularly like Friend Wheel. Many other are just games or even purely decorative trinkets but they should not be dismissed offhand: they have an important role in evangelizing social tools and in promoting use, and they have the social role of fostering playful interaction that reinforces social links. But if you look below, you’ll probably conclude that the quantity of shiny fluff is a tad overwhelming – this is the list of applications that my Facebook account blocks… And it was gathered in less than two years of activity !

• Absolut Vodka
• Addicted to NCIS
• Addicted to Two and a Half Men
• A la Antillean
• Alice Blind Test
• Amazing Wishlist
• Animated GIFTS
• A quel(le) star ressembles-tu le plus physiquement?
• A quel X-Men ressembles tu ?
• AREPAS and Venezuelan Food
• Are you a great lover ?
• Are You Lucky?
• Are you Moroccan?
• Are you romantic?
• Art
• ATTACK!
• aWizard
• Bathroom Wall
• Be a Billionaire!
• Because You’re Special
• Become Rambo
• Best Friend Contest
• Best Match!
• Best Wishes
• Birthday Alert
• Birthday Calendar
• Birthday Cards
• Blackjack
• Bless You
• Blow A Kiss
• Books iRead
• Booze Mail
• Borat / Ali G Photos, Quotes and Trivia
• Bowling Buddies
• BrainFall.com Quiz Results
• BrewSocial
• Bubble Town
• Bumper Sticker
• Bumper Stickers [Photo Gifts]
• Call Me on Skype
• Card for Africa
• Car IQ
• Cat Breed Collection
• Causes
• Chanel Gifts ?
• Characteristics
• Check Your Dudeness
• Chinese Horoscope
• Circle of Friends
• COMINGSOON
• Comment finirez vous ?
• Comment s’appellera l’homme de ta vie ?
• Comparaison
• Compare People
• Coolest Friends
• Coolest Person Contest
• Crushes
• Cute vs Sexy
• Define Me
• Delux Christmas Tree
• Denzel Washington
• De quel arrondissement parisien ètes-vous ?
• Do people secretly hate you?
• Drunk Survey
• ePresident
• Es-tu fort en histoire ?
• Etes vous un minimum cultivé ?
• Etre Marseillais
• Eurosport – Liste des 23 pour l’Euro 2008
• Family Guy – Blue Harvest
• Family Tree
• Famous Christian Quotes
• FB Addict – are you hooked on FB?
• FFR Supporters
• Fine Wines
• Flirtable
• Fortune Cookie
• Free Gifts
• Fresh Prince
• Friend Hug
• Friends For Sale!
• Fun Cards!
• Funnest Person Contest
• Funny Cards
• Fun Toys
• Genius Test
• Gifts Gallery
• Good Morning
• (Green) What fruit are you?
• Growing Gifts
• Guerre des gangs
• Hatching Eggs
• hello kitty
• High School Trivia Test
• Holiday Shoppe (Christmas Tree)
• Hotness
• Hot Potato
• Hottest Person Contest
• How gangsta are you?
• How Indian Are You?
• how smart are u?
• How stupid are you?
• How will you die?
• Hug Me
• Hug Me
• Hugs
• Hug Time
• Iframer
• iLike
• Instant IQ Test
• IQ Test
• IQ Test (Advanced Level)
• is cool
• iSmile
• Japanese Foods
• Japanese Sweets
• Jedi vs Sith
• Jetman
• Jeu de Séduction
• JungleBook
• Kisses
• Kisses!
• Kiss Me
• Knighthood
• Language Exchange
• Likeness
• Likeness UNRATED
• (Lil) Green Patch
• Local Picks
• Love Friend
• LX Champions League
• LX College Football
• LX World Cup Football
• Mario Kart RPG
• Meet New People
• Mesmo TV
• MeteoSun
• MindJolt Games
• Mood Ring
• Most Creative People
• Most Eligible Singles
• Most Gorgeous Person Contest
• Most Wanted Valentine!
• Mountain Climber
• Movies
• My Angels
• My Aquarium
• My Boxofun
• My Drunk Friends
• MyFlirt
• My Hebrew Name
• My Heroes Ability
• My Music
• My Personality
• My Questions
• MY SEXY FRIENDS
• MySpace
• MySpace Link
• NAB Smart Cookies
• Name Analyzer
• NBA Challenge
• Nicknames
• Nova Music
• OneTrack
• Optical Illusions Challenge
• OUIFM
• Owned!
• Passe Ton BAC !
• Personality
• Photo Quizzes
• Pieces of Flair
• Pillow Fight
• Pillow Fight!
• Pink Ribbon
• Portrait Chinois
• Pour quelle boîte Corse es-tu fait(e) ?
• Pour quelle époque êtiez-vous fait(e)?
• Pour quelle ville êtes-vous fait(e) ?
• Pour quelle voiture es-tu fait(e)?
• PrayLive
• Premier Football
• Pro League Rugby
• PuzzleBee Jigsaw Puzzles
• Q??l Pa?f?? E? T? ?
• Que fuyez-vous le plus ?
• Quel alcoolique êtes vous?
• Quel chroniqueur du grand journal êtes-vous?
• Quel écrivain êtes-vous?
• Quel est ce défaut chez toi qui fait craquer les hommes?
• Quel est ton degré de connerie??
• QuEl EsT tOn MeC IdEaL???
• Quel est ton niveau d’anglais?
• Quel est ton niveau sexuel ?
• Quel Festival es-tu?
• Quel genre de pute es-tu ?
• Quel joueur de rugby etes vous?
• Quel joueur du PSG 2007-2008 es-tu ?
• Quelle citation êtes-vous?
• Quelle couleur es-tu?
• Quelle desperate housewife êtes-vous ?
• Quelle icone glamour es-tu?
• Quelle ligne de métro êtes vous?
• Quelle mec te correspond ?
• Quelle paire de chaussures de créateur êtes-vous ? (pour filles)
• Quelle princesse de Walt Disney êtes vous?
• Quelles Vacances VIP es tu?
• Quel Maman est tu ?
• Quel mannequin es-tu?
• Quel méchant de Disney es-tu ?
• Quel nageur connus es tu ?
• Quel personnage de desperate housewives es-tu?
• Quel personnage de FRIENDS es-tu?
• Quel personnage de KAAMELOTT es-tu ?
• Quel personnage de la Révolution êtes-vous ?
• Quel personnage des BRONZES êtes-vous ?
• quel qualité êtes-vous?
• Quel séducteur (trice) etes-vous ?
• Quel sorte d’enfant étais-tu?
• Quel sous-vêtement êtes-vous?
• quel star es tu ?
• Que pensent les autres de toi en secret?
• Que vas tu faire de ta vie ?
• Quizzes
• RAYMOND DEMISSION !!!
• Rock Paper & Scissors
• R U CUTE!
• Save An Alien
• Say Happy New Year!
• Say-it-with-Flowers
• SceneCaster
• ScoreMe
• Secret Admirer – CRUSH on ME (PERFECT MATCH)
• Send Beer
• Send Chocolate
• Send Diamonds
• Send Good Karma
• Send HOTNESS
• Send Love Hearts
• Send Luck
• Send Sunshine
• Send Teddy Bears
• Send Tiaras
• Send Tux
• Send Veggie Tales
• Sexiest Person Contest
• Sexy Friends
• Sexy Pillow Fight
• Sexy Poke!
• Shots!
• similaire
• Six Degrees
• Sketch Me
• Skiers vs. Snowboarders
• Slayers
• Slide FunSpace
• Smiles
• Snowball Fight
• Snowball Fight!
• Social Profile
• Sparkey
• SpeedDate
• SpeedDate
• SpeedDate
• SpeedDate
• SpeedDate
• SpeedDate
• Sports Fan
• Status Competition
• Stickerz
• Sticky!
• StyleFeeder
• Sudoku
• Suomi-ilmiö
• Superlatives
• SuperPoke!
• Super Slot Machines
• Super Wall
• Sweetest Person Contest
• Tarot
• Test ton niveau de culture
• Texas HoldEm Poker
• The Brain Game
• The Legend of Zelda Fan
• The Official 100 Question Geek Test
• The Sex Compatibility Test
• The Unofficial Desperate Housewife Quiz
• The World’s Smallest Political Quiz
• Top Friends
• T.O.T. Effect
• Tower Bloxx
• Travel Brain
• Traveler IQ Challenge
• Trend Setter
• True Match
• Truth Box
• TuneSocial
• Twirl
• Twist me!
• U.S. Citizen Test
• Vampires
• Wanna Dance?
• Water Globe Gifts
• WC 2010 Euro Predictor
• We’re Related
• WereWolves
• What Beer Are You?
• What Color Is Your Heart?
• What Does My Birthday Mean?
• What Drink Are You?
• What flower are you?
• What football player are you?
• What Is Your Ideal Job?
• What is Your Secret Sexual Fantasy?
• What is Your Supermodel Personality?
• What kind of candy are you?
• What Kind of Cat Would You Be?
• What kind of hair best suits you? (for girls)
• What Kind of Mom Will You Be?
• What Lost Character Are You?
• What Mythological Creature Are You?
• What serial killer are you?
• What song are you?
• What’s Your Stripper Name?
• Whats you true name? (Girls only)
• What type of person do you attract?
• What type of warrior are you?
• When will you get married?
• Which Disney Princess Are You?
• Which Disney Song Describes Your Life Right Now?
• Which Fashion Designer Would You Be?
• Which Festival best suits you??
• which F.R.I.E.N.D.S character are you???
• Which Friends Character Are You?
• Which Grey’s Anatomy Character Are You?
• Which Hot Celeb Are You?
• Which Rockstar Are You?
• Which Sex and the City Character Are You?
• Which Simpsons Character Are You?
• Which WaterAid Country Are You?
• Who Has The Biggest Brain?
• Who is Watching You ?
• Who’s Online
• Who’s the Coolest Cat?
• Will you KISS me?
• Winnie the Pooh
• Word Challenge
• Word Twist
• YES or NO?
• Your Birthday
• You’re a Hottie
• You’re Cute
• Your Sexyness
• YouTube Video Box
• Zombies

You too can escape this minor pantheon of horror – and you can do it without the tedium of blocking each application as it spams your Facebook newsfeed. As you may know, Greasmonkey enables the customization through JavaScript of the way a webpage displays. Auto-Block Facebook Apps is a Greasmonkey script that will block application invitations sent to you by Facebook contacts. After the facebook profile page is loaded, it finds all the applications that your friends have invited you to and blocks them. Whenever you need you can go to the Facebook applications privacy controller and unblock the ones that you find somewhat valuable. With applications spam out of the way, Facebook will remain the neat social watering hole that makes it valuable for interaction with non-geeks.

Bruce Schneier brought to our attention the performance and ease of use of off-the-shelf data-mining tools for social networking analysis. With a few million CDR that sort of tool can identify user communities in the physical, temporal and social dimensions. ThorpeGlen’s graphical user interface screenshots are particularly impressive.

Needless to say that SIM swapping does not work as the IMEI is still available – that is old news. But swapping both SIM and teminal is not the solution either anymore as behavorial analysis can nowadays still yield a match. This may be the end of  the road for communications security in durable networks by pure compartimentalization. Instead of acquiring random prepaid accounts, clandestine operators should now focus on creating sufficient decoy activity so that the social signal is drowned in enough misleading connexions – and maybe only stolen accounts provide enough credible noise to evade profiling. Doing that without a single mistep is going to be difficult, especially under the sort of pressure that justify such precautions.

But whatever the performance of  the analysis system, casual mobile phone use in a clandestine context is getting more risky – if  this is an off-the-shelf system, just imagine what custom systems can do for the most advanced nations.

I keep my regular daily reading sources in publicly available aggregator built with the excellent although not updated for a good while Gregarius. I thought it might also be useful to gather all my private feeds into another Gregarius instance for my exclusive perusal.

Kudos to LinkedIn whose “Network Updates” feeds is available through an URL with a path long enough to actually be used as a basic shared secret, which is adequate security for protecting such a low value information. This lends itself perfectly to the sort of private aggregation I want.

But no brownie points to Facebook whose behavior toward open communications never fails to disappoint. Last April, Facebook made its “Friend’s Status Updates” feed available in RSS format through the same sort of pseudo secret URL as LinkedIn. So far so good : a nice gesture of openness which made me happy when I pointed Firefox at my feed’s URL.

As I was compiling the list of feeds I was going to aggregate, I tested each of them from my web server’s Z shell to check their reachability. When I pointer ELinks at my “Friend’s Status Updates” feed URL, here is what I got :

You are using an incompatible web browser.

   Sorry, we're not cool enough to support your browser. Please keep it

   real with one of the following browsers:

     * Firefox

     * Opera

     * Safari

     * Flock

Baaad Facebook ! This is so incredibly lame : not only is it an unnecessary annoyance, but it is also completely ineffective since I’ll just have to insert a wget download in my hourly Gregarius update script and tell wget to pretend being Firefox. Gregarius will then happily download the local copy through my web server. I just tested and wget –user-agent=”Mozilla” works just fine.

Even easier : I’ll modify my local Gregarius copy so that util.php at line 539 reads “$client->agent = Mozilla;” instead of “$client->agent = MAGPIE_USER_AGENT;” so that Magpie (the RSS import library for Gregarius) tells Snoopy (the HTTP client for Magpie) to use whatever Facebook wants to hear to deliver the goods.

So Facebook :

1. Gratuitously annoys its users
2. Does not even do it competently

Now, isn’t it time to really open instead ?