(Me) Thought you might find this interesting, Captain Wasteo.

http://www.kyle-brady.com/2008/10/10/how-to-cut-your-startups-costs/

It applies to people like you.

(Jason) I'm sorry, who are you?

(Me) One of the many people who don't like you, and find your "startup" attempts pretty worthless.

(Jason) 1. Clearly you don't hate me, you're obsessed with me. Why else would you email?

2. Your advice is based on what success exactly?

Best j

(Me) 1.  No.  I emailed you because I like getting the people I'm offending riled up.

2.  a)  I'm 20.  You're an old man.  I have time.
b)  I'd rather have no success than the "success" you've had.  Training a bunch of monkeys to manually type in the results from Google is not running a startup-  it's a low-level temp agency for manual data entry.  And I wouldn't even begin to call Mahalo, or any other number of Web 2.0 startups, a success.

Not the best.

(Jason) Blahblahblah....

Click, because it's relevant.

See all the things I've circled in red?  Most of those are applications I've never added.  Ever.  And in the case of "Bumper Sticker", "friendbinder", and "Top Friends"... those are ones that were added and removed (before the design change) within a 24 hour period.

My first question is:  what the hell?

Is Facebook just randomly letting applications access my data, and decide that I'm now a "user" of them?  Because, if so, that's not only stupid and wasting my time... but it's also a huge privacy concern.

My second question is:  what the hell?

I've tried to remove ALL of the ones that I circled in the screenshot... they won't go away.  They disappear from my profile, and from some of the settings pages... but remain on others.  Which would lead me to believe they're not really gone, they're just pretending to be.

My third question is:  what the hell?

There have long been rumors that Facebook doesn't actually delete any data, they just "delete" it.  Instead of removal, a field is changed to tell the rendering engine "Hey!  Don't show this!" - which might make sense in some cases, but not as an overall policy.

This is solid proof that they do exactly what people have been whispering about... besides the whole "delete my account" controversy, of course.

My fourth question is:  what the hell?

I'm actually out of "Items for Hell" at this point.

Your Mission

This needs to be fixed immediately.  Check your applications page, see if you've got anything weird going on.  Send them feedback (using the "send feedback" button... obviously), regardless of whether or not you have this problem... they need to know that many people care about this, and it's kind of a big deal.

p.s. Yes, I'm still using Vista on this computer.  But that's because I haven't gotten Ubuntu running yet... the RAID-1 array and the supersexy, but "too new", combo optical drive are creating major problems.

--------------

Update (7/28/2008 2:30pm PST): SitePoint blogger Josh Catone (formerly of RW/W) picked this up, and wrote his own take on it.

Yep.  That's right.  I can't.  All because I don't run Windows SP2 or higher, or use IE.  Who would, in this day and age, restrict such a wonderful (and potentially highly revenue-generating) thing to such arkane requirements?

Demographics

Netflix, I think you should take a look at your demographics.  Let's do a quick analysis.

1. The audience that made you popular were geeks.  Highly technically adept people that typically run the software they want, and spurn anything made by Microsoft.  (Granted, this isn't always true, but it's true enough to work with.)


2. Your current userbase is most likely comprised of well-off white collar families, movie buffs, and geeks.  Throw in a handful of college kids (who are probably highly technical as well), and you've got it.


3. Take a look at the recent browser metrics.  If you believe even the lowest estimates, ~15% of the Internet uses Firefox.  Not IE, but Firefox.  And, given your userbase, I'm betting your server logs show something closer to 35%.  Would you like to put odds on that?


4. While it's difficult to get a solid number on the amount of non-server computers running Linux, the numbers are growing.  Dell and ASUS, among others, are now offering Linux as the pre-installed OS... not to mention the unbelievable growth of Ubuntu, a flavor of Linux.

We may not be Anonymous, but we are angry nonetheless.

Technology

While we're at it, don't give us the "technological restrictions" excuse.  Anyone who's worked with streaming media can tell you this is a load of crap.  The only reason you can legitimately say your system is IE-dependent would be due to an ActiveX control... and in that case, you're just FUBAR'd already anyways.

I'm not sure how the current system works, but I see there really only being two ways for you to stream through a browser:

• Using a Flash-based Player


• Embedding a Streaming Video File

We are rising, join us while we still like you!

Those of us on Linux + FF know MORE THAN ENOUGH to be able to run a streaming file in a media player.  Maybe it doesn't work when we click.  But that doesn't really bother us, because we get what we want, and know how to do it.  Chances are we already have the media player (and codecs) to support the format... all we need is the location of the stream.  Which is very easy for you to give us.

Conclusion

In the end, any reason or excuse you can provide for these restrictions comes down to pure and utter nonsense.  You need to resolve this issue, before your users get more frustrated (which may hurt you in the long run), and especially as the market share for Firefox and Linux continue to grow at unprecedented rates.

---------------------------------

Update (6/9/2008 12:32pm PST): Neil from Netflix (confirmed via IP address) posted a snarky rebuttal in Comment #1.  See my equally snarky reply in Comment #2.]]> http://www.kyle-brady.com/2008/06/08/netflix-fail/feed/ 6