Standard disclaimer: I work for Facebook, views expressed are my own and not the company's. Yada, yada.

This post by Marco Arment obviously rubbed me the wrong way. I'll admit this post is just taking the flamebait.

I'm a pretty big Apple die-hard. I admire their quality, passion and drive to improve people's lives through products. So I follow Apple punditry regularly to keep up with the rumors and other insights. There are a number vocal Apple proponents out there, Arment and John Gruber happen to be two of them. They're usually consistently thoughtful about the motivations behind Apple's actions. Gruber in particular has been accused a number of times of being a paid Apple shill. While he gets paid very well by advertisers for what he actually does, I don't think having a pro-Apple bias means you're paid directly by Apple.

Both of them take an incendiary approach in regards to most other successful market leaders however. Their takes on Google and Facebook are prime examples of how they'll cast stones at companies from the outside without having a clue as to what goes on on the inside of. Which leads me to wonder, if they have no clue about these companies and will freely write about their evils, are their previously noted insightful takes on Apple valid? Gruber has noted he has friends inside of Apple and he also interacts with them as a "member of the press" so I'm inclined to believe his thoughts are shaped by this. Arment, as creator of one of the most popular iOS apps, might have the same.

I highly doubt they have any friends inside Google or Facebook based on their published works. So they're left to spin whatever they want about them with little regard for what's actually true. This brings me back to the post above. Some minor admissions that Apple isn't perfect, followed by generalized accusations about the motivations of Google and Facebook. If only life were so black and white. The true bullshit lies within their ability to shun commercialism except for when it suits them.

I'm no Google fan but I'm not dumb enough to fantasize that Larry Page plots and schemes ways to grab all of your data and store as a master plot to take over the world. No, they're there to provide a service to the world (index everything and make it searchable) and make a profit. Selling ads and finding better ways to target them appropriately is core to both Google and Facebook's business plans. Focusing on the business plan and ignoring the company missions is very selective hearing indeed. The irony of course is that Arment and Gruber's business plans aren't far off from the same thing.

Business Plan:

• Google: Sell targeted advertising based user interests.
• Facebook: Sell targeted advertising based on user interests.
• John Gruber: Sell advertising based on his own interests and who will pay him.
• Marco Arment: Sell software.

Core Mission:

• Google: To index the world's data.
• Facebook: To make the world more open and connected.
• John Gruber: To link to others' and offer his own opinion.
• Marco Arment: To make things he finds useful.

I'll put Facebook's track record on making the world a better place up any day against Arment and Gruber's. The holier than thou attitude is unwarranted, but is undeniably associated with the Apple-follower community. Nothing is ever good enough from a market leader, unless it's Apple.

As far as what's noted in the post about Facebook's "bullshit", I'd love to address that. Being a part of Facebook for the past 15 or so months has given me more insight on the company than these guys will ever have. It's seriously the best company in the world presently in terms of openness, honesty and mission. There are no secret plots to make it so you don't have any privacy. We want people to open up about themselves, sure. Humans are social creatures and we want to better the world by creating tools that enable that type of information sharing. But we want you to do it in a way that is comfortable for you. For some people, they'll never be comfortable with it and that's fine.

More irony comes from Arment and Gruber being proponents of Twitter, which has next-to-no privacy settings. Everything there is public by default. They're also phobic of services that want your full name, but both freely publish their own on the Internet. Why? Because identity is key to business. Identity is also key to personal areas as well though and that's the part they miss. It's okay to be for anonymity, just don't claim that every service that's not anonymous must just want your personal information to sell. Facebook doesn't sell any user information. Selling the ability to target your ads based on demographics is not even close to the same thing.

Arment's assertion that people don't want to interact with brands is not only false, it's asinine. Hundreds of millions of people "Like" things on Facebook explicitly for this reason. It's reality and observable. Twitter's current business plan is also based on this fact. Conveniently ignored of course in the context of talking about Facebook, of course. There's value to the brand (strengthening and measuring) and value to the end-user (two-way communication, involvement).

His final assertion that Facebook tracks what users do while they're logged out is false. The author of the original post that identified a bug sending too much information to Facebook wrote a follow-up post that for the most part vindicated us and our response but of course, nobody remembers the response, only the accusation which unfortunately gets repeated and repeated until it's "accepted". A good blogger should hold a higher standard, rise above the here say and examine everything from both sides.

I just wanted to get that off my chest. It's infuriating to work some place, have inside knowledge of motivations and the people working there and then have an outsider with readership demonize it in a few short, offhanded sentences. I hope everybody can work some place with as much passion as Facebook and end up making the world a little better.

With the decentralized Occupy movement in full swing (seemingly) this weekend, it has drawn lots of attention in the last few weeks. What began as a protest on Wall Street that got no coverage by major media outlets is now a bandwagon that many people have jumped on in their local cities. I understand the sentiment they're presenting; that powerful few people have affected the lives of hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people for the worse. Nobody was held accountable for our economic collapse in 2008 despite the wrongdoing of thousands in the financial sector that played fast and loose with the markets and accounting practices. For that, the people want blood. The 99% as "we" are called.

I don't generally have a defeatist attitude. I believe that one person can start something that can change the world. I think this spark could be something large, but it has a long way to go and if it is to survive, it needs to focus and organize. Right now, the message is too broad and the goals are intangible. Much like the Egyptian uprising earlier this year, the slow and steady build-up of the movement will gain the attention of its targets. But then what? What realistic demands can be made, who do we demand from and what can be done to force the hand those entities? I think these questions are at the root of the problem with the Occupy movement. If someone can gain some amount of leadership and answer these questions decisively, real change might be affected.

I honestly want it to be successful. Our financial system has been poisoned for decades and our government needs a complete overhaul. The system is broken and disruptive change is the only way to fix it. I'm not on-board with Occupy until they get some leadership and become coherent but I'm definitely not on-board with their opposition, the so-called "53%". Social programs are dirty words to these people and they believe that the poor, the sick, the helpless should be exterminated rather than assisted. It's quite frankly a disgusting, selfish attitude. We all should look out for each other. We all should provide for each other. The "53%" believe we're okay the way we are and are complacent in believing sweeping change can come from within the system. The bureaucratic political bumbling of the past decade in America has show that changes are minimal and compromised.

We're all citizens of the planet. We need to stop pretending that each of us owns the place. Uprisings by definition are a large group people speaking very loudly against the entrenched system. We need an uprising against financial and political corruption. This may be it, but I'm skeptical for now.

I never met Steve Jobs. I was never in the same room with him, or said Hello in passing. Yet he still had a profound impact on my life.

I remember seeing Triumph of the Nerds that my Dad taped from PBS when I was 14 or 15 and watching it over and over. I was captivated by the stories of the computer industry pioneers. One person in particular, I was enamored with. When Steve Jobs spoke about why art is important in technology products and the importance of a good user interface, it was hard not to be entranced by his charisma. It still is a potent reminder of why I revere Silicon Valley so much and why despite all of its annoyances, I still find it somewhat magical to be working here today.

His work has changed the lives of millions of people and undoubtedly has touched the lives of billions. Steve's attention to detail, unwillingness to accept anything less than the best and desire to be, above all, an artist are what made Steve one-of-a-kind. I've soaked up as much as possible of what he's written and his rare interviews. You can't help but become more passionate about things like design and vision when you hear him speak. His spirit will live on in all of us that have been influenced by him in some way.

He led the most impactful life that anyone could hope to have. My count is that he changed industries four times in his life. Entire industries. FOUR times...

The Apple II led the personal computer revolution.
The Mac brought a GUI revolution to mass-computing.
The iPod triggered a business model shift for the entire music industry.
The iPhone popularized the idea that anyone can make use of a smartphone.

All these things were not accomplished by Jobs alone but his persistent vision, incessant tweaking and unwillingness to launch before they were ready were critical to these successes. Arguably, in another 3-5 years, it will be apparent that another computing shift was triggered by the iPad. That would make a fifth time. And I know he still wasn't done.

He faced death numerous times over his final years and had plenty of time to embrace his fate. He made the most of his remaining time. We should all be so lucky to make peace with ourselves and our mortality before the end. There will be innumerable tributes to him and his life, this post is just one small part of that. But I personally thank you, Steve. You were one of the crazy ones. You pushed the human race forward.

Link: http://www.twitlonger.com/show/bt2p2o

I'd like to really fault Google here but you'll have stories like this when you try to manage hundred of millions of users. There's no way to police a user base that big manually, you have to have automation and there will always be some false positives. It's a thankless job and always ends up upsetting people, but if you don't comply with the menagerie of laws out there, you won't be around for long.

The inexcusable part is when you try to contact a company and they come up with no reasons for their actions. Google runs afoul here.

Lastly, there is some blame to place on this person. Anything you put on the cloud (including on Facebook) is essentially out of your control once the data leaves your computer. You should always backup and keep copies of your content and never rely on any online service to be there indefinitely.

His post is pretty over-the-top but I would probably be pretty irate if I were in his shoes. But best practices will save the day. Today's smartphones can easily sync from these accounts and act as a backup. Heck, you can even download your content from Facebook and have it around as a backup just-in-case.

(Disclaimer: I work for Facebook. Opinions herein are my own and not Facebook's.)

I put together a little Twitter search crawl at work to scroll results of a 'Facebook' search. It's extremely valuable to understand what people are saying about you or your work. You can get honest feedback and then you can take that and try to understand what drives someone to have a particular piece of feedback. Once you have an understanding, you can begin to fix whatever issues there may be causing negative feedback. I don't pretend that Facebook is perfect. There is plenty to do and gaining a mass-consensus on what the biggest pain points are is a big help. If you don't do searches on Twitter or even the web about your company, I highly recommend you do and try to understand what the results mean.

Aside from getting various random feedback on how people use the service, I've also seen a big theme in the last two weeks since I started. Many people are comparing Facebook and Twitter as if they were the same thing and making predictions that Facebook will topple in 2011. I'm not any good at predictions, but let's just say I'm pretty secure in Facebook's prospects for 2011. As for the comparing, I also see a trend with the #iprefer hashtag on Twitter with, unshockingly, most people on Twitter claiming they prefer Twitter.

You don't have to choose. Why? Because Facebook and Twitter are not the same thing. Not even close. I think most people think they're more closely related to each other than they are because they both have the description of being a "social network". Absolutely, both are social networks, but Twitter has strengths in very different areas than Facebook has strengths. Neither can replace the other in current form. If one were suddenly to disappear tomorrow, there would be a huge void.

First, let's look at how relationships are formed on both services. On Twitter, relationships are one-way. Either I follow you and get all of your status updates or you follow me and get all of my status updates. Twitter doesn't require reciprocation, though many people do reciprocate to people they know in real life. This lightweight connection makes it very attractive for companies and celebrities who want to reach a mass-audience and still get some feedback since on Twitter you're not required to have an existing relationship with someone in order to mention them (which they can then see) or message them. On Facebook, the relationship is two-way. I friend you then you friend me and only then when both peers agree is there a relationship. Further, Facebook encourages that you only friend people you actually know in real life. This keeps the social graph useful to actual things you do in real life on a daily basis and maintains a basic expectation of privacy that one should have with their friends. As a side note, Facebook does offer a one-way relationship with "Pages" meant for businesses or personalities to be able to maintain this relationship and give updates without adding additional trusted relationships. So really, there are two types of relationships on Facebook but for the purposes of these writings, I'm focusing on person-to-person distinctions.

There is also a dividing line of authenticity between the two services. Facebook requires you to use your real name. Twitter, on the other hand, identifies users by a handle and doesn't require you to identify yourself at all. As a result, Twitter can be used far more anonymously and messages that propagate across it are generally held less accountable than things posted on Facebook where your real life reputation could be at stake. This is a key point between the two services. Depending upon your stance about online privacy, this may make or break your opinion about Facebook. The upside to it is that when you read a writing from someone who you know and trust, that writing is given a heavier weight than from someone you may not know personally at all and goes by a handle foreign to you.

Understandably, many people are fearful of putting their real identity "out there" on the Internet. Facebook does provide fairly diverse privacy settings that can limit what the outside world sees of your activity and includes granular, person-specific controls. It takes a lot more effort on the part of the user to configure compared to Twitter's private on/off switch, which blocks everyone from viewing your updates unless you authorize them, but the fact that there is less identifying information shared on Twitter allows it to have such basic privacy controls. Facebook's current privacy controls allow more flexibility and are a result of much trail and error and user feedback. Facebook doesn't have a flawless record when it comes to introducing new privacy controls and getting users to understand them fully. In the past year, Facebook has learned a lot about how to launch a new or enhanced feature and I'm pretty confident that Facebook's worst days of privacy issues are behind it. The polar difference between Facebook and Twitter's privacy controls is another key differentiator between the two.

Next, we'll look at what each service is. Twitter is, at heart, a communications tool. Its primary function is to pass messages (or "status updates") in a one-to-many fashion with as little frills as possible. While Facebook contains that same functionality, Facebook offers a vastly wider range of features and services. Facebook is a platform for other applications. It's a photo service, a video service, a forum service, a messaging service, etc., etc. The core functionality of Facebook is maintaining your identity online and applying that identity along with your connections to your friends (known as the "social graph") to any application that can be dreamt up and where that information would be useful. It can make things online more personal, more relevant and more involving. Put in that context, Twitter and Facebook couldn't be more different. Twitter is a communications tool that is very focused on delivering short messages. Facebook is a platform that can be used very generically to provide social functions to websites or applications. The scope is of each is a third key differentiator.

As side note to the first paragraph, a very useful way to use Twitter is for quickly gauging the pulse of mob mentality. Twitter offers a great search feature to do keyword searches across all non-private status updates. Facebook can not replicate this simply based on the way privacy is structured as noted earlier. As the diversity of the Twitter ecosystem expands, the search function becomes more of an invaluable real-time opinion research service.

Taken all together, the implication is clear. Facebook tends to be a more private venue for sharing with closer relationships than Twitter which tends to be a more public venue for sharing less identifiably with wider range of acquaintances. That's not to say people don't use either for the other, many people do, but as a generalized concept, I believe this to be correct. Many users tend to overlook this concept and instead focus on the feature set or what they see on the screen when they login. The intangibles are what gives each service its identity however and is what makes comparisons between the two or preferences somewhat irrelevant. I think that both Twitter and Facebook are doing their jobs very well and will continue to thrive throughout 2011 and beyond. Both services will continue to evolve of course. Twitter has done well with a slow rate of change and I think it would service them well to stay focused on the core of the product. Facebook, again, is the opposite as they rapidly rollout new and rethink old functionality. This strategy has also served Facebook well and will undoubtedly continue to do so.

I hope this has been a somewhat cogent argument as to why "Facebook vs. Twitter" obsessions are missing the point of what each service is and what they offer. Your mindset will likely more align you to one or the other, but if you want to open yourself up a little, you should really give the other a try. It may have something to offer you that you don't expect.

I recently changed jobs and coming from eBay where the preferred communication method is Skype (natch!), I'm now at a company that prefers Jabber. That's all fine and well and being a Mac guy, Adium is the most well-known and arguably richest-featured client. IRC is also used heavily and coincidentally right when I joined up, the present beta of Adium included new IRC support. I'm of the opinion that one good solution usually is a better option than 2 separate great ones used at the same time, so I gave the new Adium a go.

It worked for the most part. It did the usual things that Adium is prone to do like hang while connecting to a Jabber server that's heavily populated with users. IRC worked as well but isn't very full featured and that's fine being a first release. The major problem I had with it though was that when joined to several large IRC channels (2-3 channels with more than 200 users, but also a few smaller ones under 50 users), a message on a channel would lock Adium for 1-3 seconds every time. It's a decidedly annoying and inconvenient issue.

Not having a huge amount of time to look into the issue further or even properly report it on their bug tracker (like a good user should), I just decided to fire off a quick tweet about it and vent a little. At the time, I thought it was a polite way of bringing to their attention that the IRC plug-in had performance issues. I was instead greeted with this reply.

I'm a big boy and I can handle some harshness directed towards me. I also understand that the Adium account is shared by several developers and that the opinion shared by one of them isn't necessarily the opinion of all of them. But this should be a lesson to any entity sharing a single account: be careful whom you give the keys to. One rotten apple can spoil the whole bunch.

To be clear, I don't hold the opinion that the developers of any free software project "owe" me anything. I appreciate their efforts in bettering the software community as a whole. But I think those that release buggy or poor performing software should be prepared for some negative statements directed towards their "artwork". Bug reports are feedback, no matter how terse or uncaring they might seem. A good developer will take that feedback and want to understand what is happening and why. A poor developer will simply shrug it off with a response like the one I was given. Again, this was just one of Adium's developers writing this, not the whole team and I have no doubt there are a number of great developers working on Adium.

@Adium did respond the following day with an apology and wanted to know more about the actual problem. Perhaps if I have some time, I'll do a process profile as their troubleshoot suggests and send that off to them so they can better the software. This is how free software works and both users and developers have to do their part.

As an aside, I retweeted their response for my own amusement. A number of my friends responded, some with tagging @Adium in their replies. Eventually, the actual user (@Robbyison) behind the comment replied to one of my friends. Here is a screenshot of his replies. Apparently, his mindset is that if it's free, everything is acceptable and users shouldn't complain. That's the wrong mindset to have but is probably fairly common among OSS developers.

My takeaway from this is that maybe a separate Jabber client and IRC client aren't so bad after all.

It looks like in Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6), Apple broke some of the smartiness in NFS mounting from Finder. In 10.5, you could just slap nfs://host/path into Finder's "Connect to Server" dialog and it would happily mount just fine. In 10.6, it doesn't and here's what you get...

On the server, a mountd success message is the only indication that it received communication:

Oct  5 09:15:59 nfsserver mountd[5551]: authenticated mount request from 1.2.3.4:1015 for /nfsshare (/nfsshare)

On the client, the dialog box will briefly show the progress bar and then revert back to the "Connect to Server" input box. When mounting on the command-line, you'll get:

bash-3.2# mount_nfs nfsserver:/nfsshare /nfsmount
mount_nfs: /nfsmount: Operation not permitted

The disconnect is that Linux by default expects "secure" ports to be used for NFS. Mac OS X on the other hand defaults now to "insecure" ports. The secret sauce to get it to mount via mount_nfs is to specify the resvport mount option on the command-line or the better option of telling Linux to allow insecure ports for NFS communication in /etc/exports. Doing the latter will allow you to mount via the "Connect to Server" dialog or on the command-line.

If you just want to mount a Linux NFS mount (that by default does not allow "insecure" ports), use this on the Mac OS X command-line:

mount_nfs -o resvport nfsserver:/nfsshare /nfsmount

If you want to allow Mac OS X to mount Linux NFS mounts on the server, make sure your export line contains insecure. Here's an example line in /etc/exports:

/nfsshare          1.2.3.5(ro,async,no_root_squash,no_subtree_check,insecure)

Linux enforces an idealistic multi-user machine view of the old world. This concept of defining "insecure" and "secure" based on privileged port numbers is antiquated and doesn't apply in a world where everyone has ultimate privileges on their desktop machines.

I started using IRC many, many moons ago. I vaguely remember using Windows 3.1 to use mIRC so that had be around 1994. I was 13 years old, so naturally I gravitated towards teen chat channels (or 'rooms' to the layperson). I was a fairly shy kid. I didn't tend to speak to people I didn't know or at least start the initial conversation so chatting on the computer was comfortable to me. Not only did it give the opportunity to chat with hundreds if not thousands of people I wouldn't otherwise have been able to, it also allowed me to project a different persona.

Typing to people over the Internet can be very calculated. You can be snarky, mean, or caring often with basically the same words but words are all you're giving to people online. It doesn't matter what your body language is doing, it doesn't matter what you even look like. The only thing that matters is the content of what you are saying. To a 13 year old, it's paradise. You can be whoever you want to be simply by tapping away on the keyboard.

I poked around the different networks at first before somehow ending up on the original, oldest network there was (and still is today): EFnet. I was hooked for several years. Chatting up guys and girls alike. In #teen14 originally, when there were a zillion different teen channels (channels could be created simply by joining one that didn't yet exist). Eventually I migrated to the more populated and popular #teenchat and #teen. I made a number of good friends on that channel and had some real life encounters with many of them. It was that whole process that opened up my personality up a little.

As most people on IRC, I was snarky online. I created somewhat of an arrogant online presence, taking my nickname from the late WWE wrestler Mr. Perfect. By day at school, I was mostly quiet but when I got home and go online, I was anything but. It was a good non-destructive outlet for a teenager.

I got my first job at Stratos in Cleveland, OH which was purchased shortly thereafter by a company called CoreComm. They then also purchased MegsInet out of Chicago, IL. Interestingly shortly before the purchase, MegsInet linked an IRC server to EFnet which eventually got renamed for CoreComm's domain, irc.core.com. Being a part of the company and one of the few with a great interest in IRC, I got the privilege of being an operator (or IRCop as it's known).

This was in late '99 or early 2000. It was great fun being an admin of an EFnet server. irc.core.com also went on to set records for number of connected clients. I can't remember the number specifically, but I want to remember that it was the first server to reach over 10k concurrent connections. I remember purchasing the upgraded server for it, a massive dual Pentium III-500mhz if I recall. irc.core.com held a large percentage of all users on EFnet for a long time before it was finally shutdown by management due to DDoS attacks. It didn't help that most of the people that had originally supported the server (myself and wjr, William Rockwood) had left CoreComm. Losing the supporting employees of a server at a company will doom an IRC server. I was an operator on irc.plur.net after irc.core.com shutdown. Eventually, I found myself working for Easynews which already had sponsored IRC servers on EFnet and Undernet. It was natural at this point to become an operator on that as well.

And so I have been, ever since 2005. Over the years, IRC itself has inevitably seen a large decline in the number of users, peaking in 2003 with nearly 142k clients. The decline has largely been due to the evolution of communication over the Internet. Back when IRC was first developed in the late 80s, there was no IM clients and the web was in its infancy and not at all interactive. IRC offered a real time protocol to send short text messages to individuals or whole groups of people in channels. It was without question the most interactive and real time thing on the Internet. When ICQ and AIM came along and became popular, it started to eat into the user base. As time went on and forums and social networks began to enter the fray, it gave us new ways of meeting people and again reduced the usefulness of IRC. Today, EFnet handles roughly a third of what it peaked at, around 45k connections.

And finally, I get to the point of my remembrance. irc.easynews.com has been shutdown. With this server being delinked, I no longer am an operator on EFnet after almost 11 years. Being that I don't even use IRC much these days, I'm not sad that it's gone however I am sad nothing lasts forever and the good old days of my youth are officially gone.