Facebook Stats… 2

The stats aren’t totally broken, just flaky.

I took a look at the new stat system. It’s going to be great, far more detailed than before. That said it froze my browser (Mozilla) after a few minutes. Its ok. I wrote a few custom scripts to keep track of users on my own. This might actually be even more useful later on.

Destruction leads to a very rough road, but it also breeds creation
-RHCP

reCAPTCHA

I was poking around mail() functions for the researcher authentication system when I discovered reCaptcha. It’s run by a lab at Carnegie Melon. In a nutshell it reads books and when it hits a word it can’t understand, it sends in it as a CAPTCHA [those forms that determine if you're human].

About 60 million CAPTCHAs [aprogram that can tell whether a user is human or robot] aresolved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

That’s a win-win for me.

New Facebook App… Huh?

I don’t understand the rational behind the new Facebook Apps. Users no longer ‘Add’ or ‘Remove’ apps. Instead a user is asked to ‘authorize’ the app, allowing it access to profile info etc.

This is a real pain in the ass.

Before we used a script (post-add) which would add the user to the database, create an account, and all the other housekeeping. That’s gone. Now I have to add users to the database at a few strategic locations instead. Not a hard to do, but it muddles up things. To boot, there’s no more ‘post-remove’ link. This means I have no idea when a user removes the application. My DB swells, my metrics are unreliable, and a lot of issues are created. Again, frustrating.

The facebook app settings page is a mess of old style config and new style config. Annoying.

But easily the worst move on facebook’s move was breaking stats. How could they release this new style without stats? Word on the street is that they are ‘working on it.’ But really that’s unacceptable.

I’m sure this will be sorted out soon… But we really need some documentation / explanation of the new rational. It’s hard to launch an app when you don’t know what ‘version’ of facebook your users are using. This is incredibly bad timing.