General Questions/Comments

Re: Unfair platform use? Hidden features?

ms1 — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 21:02:34 GMT

StephanieBamBam:
If they haven't pulled the application down yet, it'll happen momentarily.

That was almost two weeks ago.

Q: Any guesses on the current status?

A: The app is still up and still prompts you for your myspace user name and password so they can spam your friends. See their spam input form here. It's not an oversight on Rockyou's part. There's no technical or operational glitch. The app is still up, because RockYou isn't being punished for willfully and blatently violating the TOS.

In his defense, Lance Tokuda from RockYou basically said, "other people do it too. Including slide." How persuasive.

So MDP'ers,

Can we expect more anti-spam lip service, but then no follow up?
Are you asking us to write our apps dirty?

Because without punishing RockYou in any manner, it appears your tough talk is hot air, and the scrappiest apps will "win".

sigh.

Being a gardener, Goethe knew he had to pull weeds to make his garden grow.

Re: Fight application spam

StephanieBamBam — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 21:56:49 GMT

thank you joe!

Re: Fight application spam

Joe — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 18:54:36 GMT

Stephanie, it's heartening to know that you and your team are putting in the effort to launch these API with the proper controls from the very beginning. It's better to be proactive about dealing with spam than reactive and we're all on board with that!

-Joe (snapvine)

Re: Fight application spam

Jonathan — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 13:14:12 GMT

Nice one Jeremy.

Re: Fight application spam

rondata — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 10:08:49 GMT

You write well Jeremy :)

I never get tired of reading your posts... and that was an awesome one :)

Re: Fight application spam

StephanieBamBam — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 06:36:56 GMT

I love you Jeff, and I love you Jeremy. :D

I didn't mean to be snippy, I just found the concept of an "open letter against spam" protesting something that doesn't even exist yet extremely funny.

Oh, and I think Chad, Chris, Viphak, Ronda and I can totally take on a group of developers any day. :D

Re: Fight application spam

Jeremy — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 06:01:56 GMT

I'm gonna wax a little philosophical, a bit historical, and maybe a tad sentimental here, so feel free to just skip this post.

I got a message from Rhonda a short while ago, just saying thanks for the support, despite the fact that I'm not really affiliated to the MDP Team. She's right. I'm not invested in this - I don't work for a company that plans to use the platform. I'm not a power developer, hoping to leverage and monetize on my coding.
I'm a bartender in a podunk town, with nothing riding on the MDP except perhaps a place to kill a few hours.
I signed up for a Myspace account about 18 months ago, not because I wanted to meet new people or 'cause all the cool kids were doing it, but because I'd just moved 3000 miles away from the place I still call home, and my friends said we could use MySpace to keep in touch.
We haven't, not really. Yeah, we send a message now and then. Once in a while, someone posts a blog about what they're up to. But usually, we just pick up the phone or write an e-mail.
Sure, I'd like to write that million dollar MySpace App, that buys me a plane ticket back to LA, back to the bittersweet air and lovely sunshine.
But really, I've got no expectations. I've got nothing riding on this. I've got no affiliations.
You know, one of the first things I did when I got my account was poked around the menus and buttons, looking for the place where MySpace let you do things like change the colors or set the backgrounds or whatever. You know what? There weren't any. MySpace didn't hand that to you. They didn't make it simple. 18 months ago, all javascript was disabled, Flash embeds were locked down tightly, and they didn't even have that "style" section for CSS they do now.
And, yet, somehow, people had all sorts of personalizations and customizations. There's got to be a few hundred sites dedicated to nothing but cut-and-paste code.
Because what MySpace did was leave a little window, a small place that, with the right kind of creativity, could be used to do incredible things. I've seen some damn impressive layouts on Myspace profiles. If those had just been normal websites, I'd probably find them less impressive. Because, so what, you had all the options in the world, WYSIWYG editors, complete access to all the scripts, plugins, and code you wanted. But do that, here, through a tiny window; that's genius. Put us in a box, and the smaller the walls, the more impressive that genius makes the wallpaper.
And, what's funny, is that if the MDP Team announced tomorrow that this was it - how it is is how it's gonna be, no more APIs, glitches and all, there would still be a group of sluggers here, punching code and making it work. The guys who've been in the trenchs, here, the Josephs and Jonathons and the others who don't whine and moan about being limited, about not having enough of this or that, but kick around code, get creative, get crazy, break their apps and fix them only to break them again, throw up code bits, listen to other suggestions. They'd be here, still, fighting the glitches, pushing back those limits, being that kind of genius, making that wallpaper shine. They'd make it work.
And I'll tell you this - they'd make it fly.
Virality isn't a construct - it's not a specification, it's not an interface, it doesn't breathe binary. Virality, in its totality, is not a business plan, it's an unruly child who'll kick you in the shins if you let it, and sometimes you gotta, because it's how you learn. MySpace has been a breeding ground. Several hundred sites, dedicated to filling in a gap that MySpace didn't support, didn't push, didn't ask a soul to do. That's virality. And sure, it's bitten back - MySpace has taken its hits, been called the *** runaway child of social networks. An unruly wild west of people doing things that other poeple might not like. Because you don't push virality. It pushes you. You let Apps dictate their spread, you're pushing back. And the people doing the things you don't like them doing aren't going to buy that. They don't swing that way. We do it our way.
Virality is the moment a motion because a movement.
Because this is ours. We took that tiny hole MySpace left, and went crazy, pushed it, made it ours, and we'll do it again, with this platform, however it turns out. Because it pushes us. And when its hard, it means we had to do the work, we had to sweat the blood, and at the end of the day, when all the pencil pushers, academics, and those looking to package that instinct belly up to my bar to drown thier diatribes, they'll never understand that we never wanted it easy.
Because you making it easy, you telling me how it should be done, makes it yours, not mine.
I'm not affiliated. I've got nothing invested. But out there in that imaginary land of 1s and 0s where a profile page exists with my name on the top of it, that's mine. That's my little bit of genius. That's the end result of true virality.

That's my space.

Re: Fight application spam

Shrimpy Doodle — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 03:53:41 GMT

LOL, I can't wait for messaging API cause we all know its going to have glaring security issue where we can cause a viral worm. Juicy.

Re: Fight application spam

Cyn — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 03:06:43 GMT

I actually hate to agree with this. I don't want to hurt the virality of my apps, but Facebook has become the exemplar of what-not-to-do.

If you do enable app-initiated or app-assisted messaging, please include strict, stringent controls on them. I think you're better off without it, though.

It's nice to see that myspace cares when apps violate their TOS. Your competition's attitude tends to be very different, which puts developers in a horrible place.

Re: Fight application spam

Jeff — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 02:02:12 GMT

It's perfectly fine that the messaging APIs aren't available yet. The end users don't want the application messaging API's to become available. Ever.

The OpenSocial specification states that websites (containers) don't have to implement the application messaging or invitation functions. If MySpace is really concerned about spam, they simply won't implement those functions.

MySpace already has a user-level messaging system where users can tell their friends about great applications. Why create functions that allow applications to initiate messages?

I know that MySpace is backed into a corner by some vocal developers yelling that they need an easier way to spam users, but hopefully the user experience comes first. Plenty of honest, spam-free developers are eager to fill the spot of any developer that feels they can't build an application without the spam functions.

P.S. Stephanie is cute when she's snippy :)

Re: Fight application spam

rondata — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 00:32:39 GMT

HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaa

I love Jeremy! He's my NEW BFF!!!! HAHAHA

I'd like to offically nominate this of POST OF THE DAY! ..

Re: Fight application spam

Jeremy — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 00:24:27 GMT

Wait, did Stephanie just get snippy? Man, you guys must have really ticked her off.

Not that I can blame her. Half the threads want to know when Apps will be allowed to spam the hell out of everyone and invade their privacy, and half want to know what the MDP is doing to stop that from happening. I was half-expectng to hear on the news about a riot breaking out in SF during DevJam, and to see Chad waving a flaming set of opensocial reference notes, screaming "Yeah! Should I tell which container you can shove this Activity API into?!" Stephanie would be in the background somewhere, bambaming the head of some dude wearing a "Facebook Rules!" t-shirt. A group of rabid Flash developers would have Viphak cornered. Rhonda, of course, would probably be obliviously crowd-surfing.

Chris Bissell? Notably absent.

Re: Fight application spam

StephanieBamBam — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 20:44:05 GMT

An open letter? We've been concerned about application spam since day 1.

Our concern over app spam is a huge reason why we don't have any messaging api's available yet. Sooo...can I ask one thing? If you're all REALLY as concerned as we are about spam, let us take the time we need to get the messaging/notification API's right. We don't want to roll out with spam holes in our API's and then have to pull it all back in.

Hopefully they'll be coming shortly, but hey, it's only taking some time because we're doing what you all want, right? Fighting spam!

Re: Fight application spam

Jonathan — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 13:08:47 GMT

One of the oft-maligned features of myspace is that you have to have a unique, valid email address for each application. This is actually a good idea in that it may help slow down the proliferation of crap-apps that have flooded Facebook (where any developer account can have unlimited applications)

Fight application spam

Jeff — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 09:06:04 GMT

Here's an open letter asking MySpace to fight application spam:

http://fight.opensocial.spam.googlepages.com/home

We don't want MySpace flooded with application spam like Facebook.