It’s bothered me for a long time that movie studios seem to think the only story worth telling about a superhero is the origin. You get a trilogy if you’re lucky, then back to another origin take. It would be like only ever running the pilot of every TV show even though they’re designed to set things up for an extended run. Or, I don’t know, remaking the prologue of Les Misérables over and over again without ever going further with Jean Valjean.
Yesterday, my phone suddenly started downloading something called “Facebook build (somethingorother).” It didn’t show any progress, wouldn’t go away, and I worried that maybe it was a piece of malware or something buggy. A quick search turned up nothing. A later search found other people asking what this was. Late last night, there were articles about “Hey, why is Facebook updating itself!”
It turns out that yes, Facebook is now downloading its own updates on Android phones and tablets instead of just pushing them out through the relevant app stores (Google Play and Amazon, mainly). I’m sure they thought it was a great idea — web browsers like Firefox and Chrome have been doing this for several years on the desktop.
The problem is that it violates expectations of what the app will do, and where your software is coming from.
Imagine your car’s manufacturer issues a recall. Now imagine three scenarios:
Scenario 1: You receive a notice of the recall, asking you to make an appointment to bring the car in for maintenance. (For those of you who don’t drive, this is how it normally works.)
Scenario 2: You receive a notice offering to send a technician out to do the repairs at your home or workplace. (This would be awesome, but impractical.)
Scenario 3: You’re sitting in the living room when you hear a noise from the garage. You go out to investigate and find someone messing with your car.
That’s what this feels like.
It’s one thing to offer software through third-party channels. The fact that it’s possible is one of the reasons I prefer Android to iOS. In that case, notifying me of updates, maybe even simplifying the download would be very convenient — if I know ahead of time that it’s going to happen. And if they’re not switching channels on me. A download coming from some new location, but claiming to be a familiar piece of software, and a notice telling you to install it? That’s how trojans work.
In short, it’s a violation of trust…and if there’s one thing we’ve learned about Facebook over the last few years, it’s that the social network has enough problems with trust.
ShareThis is rolling out a tool for “frictionless sharing.” That’s the term for those apps or widgets that “let” you broadcast everything you do on a site to your social network. I suppose it sounds great for publishers, because your content gets shared more, but…
As someone who reads stuff online, “Frictionless sharing” is a privacy disaster waiting to happen. Undo is nice, but in a world where updates are pushed instantly, you can’t count on it.
As someone who follows social networks, it’s just more noise. I don’t want to know every article you read in your latest wiki walk. I’ll tune it out, or I’ll tune you out. What I want to know is which articles, photos and videos you think are worth sharing.
Randy Cassingham of This Is True has been driving a weekly Twitter event he calls Pet Peeve Wednesday, with the hashtag #PPW*. Some items I’ve posted about things that Just Bug Me(tm). I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised that they fall into two categories, tech and language.
Tech Annoyances
Language Annoyances
*There’s a hashtag collision with both “Pet Peeve Wednesday” and “Prove People Wrong” using the same tag.
I just spent too long troubleshooting a failed file transfer by email. Appropriately enough, it turns out this cartoon is the top search result for “file transfer.”
