In this listing of all the various tool and technologies that Facebook uses to serve up one gazillion requests per second, I found the following paragraph very interesting:

Gatekeeper also lets Facebook do something called “dark launches”, which is to activate elements of a certain feature behind the scenes before it goes live (without users noticing since there will be no corresponding UI elements). This acts as a real-world stress test and helps expose bottlenecks and other problem areas before a feature is officially launched. Dark launches are usually done two weeks before the actual launch.

This is a great idea.  Launch functionality behind the scenes, but don’t launch the corresponding UI elements.

Why is this great?

1. Forces your team to get good at a deploying
2. Forces your team to think about separating UI and business processing during architecture meetings
3. Allows you to start exercising the functionality in the real world (perhaps through hidden URLs or something) before users get to it
4. Exposes naughty integration failures

I like it.

This was in my Facebook notifications pane just a minute ago:

A “designer rifle”?  WTF?  I didn’t even know there was such a thing.  I’m almost afraid to Google the phrase.

Following up on yesterday’s post about widgets which wondered why anyone would try to build a business on a pure-play widget strategy, comes this interesting little nugget from VC Fred Wilson:

I have to be careful because I am in possession of confidential data from our portfolio companies. But I can assure you that these companies are making a lot of money on these apps

Do tell! Could they be using Fred’s favorite web business model to make money? Or maybe they’re using one of the other models on this list that Fred posted.

I don’t think these guys are using the “free+premium” strategy. Slide and Rock You appear to be advertising-only. Can you find any premium services to pay for?

Zynga is a bit more interesting. There’s this tidbit from Valleywag a few days ago:

[Mark Pincus] claims he hasn’t touched his $10 million in VC funding because he’s in the lucrative business of selling application referrals within Zynga’s Facebook games — a pyramid scheme if there ever was one.

We know web advertising can work. So maybe that’s the secret sauce behind these Facebook widget companies. But throwing eyeball-acquisition dollars around? That doesn’t make much sense to me.

Tell me where I’m making the mistake.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: FredWilson, Zynga, Slide, Rock You, Facebook, Widgets

Not that I would ever think that this line of thought would be spoon-fed to an analyst in order to throw some cold water on a competitor’s rising fortunes:

Eric Savitz of Barron’s Tech Trader Daily blog notes that the company’s CFO said Google’s “social networking inventory is not monetizing as well as expected.”

(h/t Mathew Ingram)

Blogged with Flock

Tags: Google, Facebook, Advertising

Attention QuizRocket: I don’t want to have to give you my:

• Full Name
• E-mail Address
• Street Address
• Zip Code
• Phone Number

… just to take a lame, poorly-formatted Facebook quiz. Didn’t you guys learn fuck-all from November’s Beacon fiasco?  Privacy is important, people.

Every time I go to Facebook I get pissed that I only got a 40% score on the Pulp Fiction quiz.  I love Pulp Fiction.  I stood in line the first night it came out in theaters.  I quote from it.  It’s probably the only movie with a gay rape scene that I’ll recommend to friends (Ed: are you sure?  Yes.  Yes.)  But I got a motherfucking 40% on the quiz.  How was that again?  Grr.

Robert Scoble, Facebook minister-without-portfolio, is abandoning Facebook after his account was suspended for some amateurish data scraping attempts. I say “amateurish” only because he was caught — I have no idea what technology he was using to scan the Facebook site for data.

The wag would suggest that he needed more than 4,999 friends to feel socially accepted, but I doubt that. I think it’s more about how he wants 4,999 friends on 12 different social networks!

But seriously, this is a good point to take a stand on. If the time you’ve invested in creating your network isn’t recoverable should you want to move systems, why should you invest the time to begin with? Why not go with something more open (as in borders, not source code) and portable?

(h/t TechCrunch)

Following up on my Facebook-Beacon-is-the-devil post from a couple weeks ago, we now have a Facebook group that is protesting Facebook?  The possibilities for stack overflow via poorly-planned recursion are staggering.  I kid.  Here’s the group:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5930262681&ref=nf

They have a link to a MoveOn.org petition that you can sign that will tell FB to bugger off.  Let’s hope they are successful and at the very least, FB provides an opt-in, vs. opt-out, mechanism for the new Beacon service.

(h/t Ethan Zuckerman via Dave Winer)

So it turns out to no one’s surprise that Facebook’s new Beacon platform is going to try to grab consumer behavioral clues wherever it can get its grubby little mitts on them. Nate Weiner from the Idea Shower found this out the hard way. During a few minutes relaxing with Desktop Tower Defense, Facebook, in partnership with Kongregate, decided it was going to inform the world of his time-wasting ways.

Nothing has gotten me to install the BlockSite plugin for Firefox — until now.

Is there anything in Kongregate’s privacy policy about this specific sort of information sharing? There’s this paragraph:

Unless we tell you first (such as at the time we collect information from you), or unless it is part of a specific program or feature in which you have elected to participate, we do not share your personally identifiable information (such as name or email address) with other, third-party companies for their own commercial or marketing purposes.

To me, that doesn’t solve the Beacon intrusion privacy problem. Maybe. It’s a tough call. Either way, I read on Nate’s blog that Jim Greer, the CEO of Kongregate, jumped in right away and is going to add some privacy feature(s) to Kongregate to make the Beacon relationship much more explicit. Good for him.

(h/t the Idea Shower » » Block Facebook Beacon)