jondoh

Also, "break things".

Yes! I use facebook much more than I otherwise would because of the Friend Lists feature. I assure you that the users to whom this feature is important have found it. I presume that Google somehow believes that the rest of you will suddenly be super impressed with this feature now it is brought to your attention.

The difference is that this test is optional. I was just perusing the competition to see what it was all about. Who wants to spend all that time reading the instructions for a test I might not even bother to take? I clicked the link to download an input file, and then realized that doing so caused me to fail that question. Not a good experience. After encountering something else that was the slightest bit confusing, I just gave up on the whole thing.

Did anyone else read the words "NSA Hooking Up" and expect the article to be about something entirely different?

Exactly! I was going to say these folks better expect a buyout offer for their amazing real-time search tool until I realized that what it offers has been available on Facebook itself for a while, and nobody cares. I don't mean nobody cares that people's posts are public. I mean, nobody cares to search people's posts because doing so is NOT USEFUL.

Ironic how it appears that the catalyst for what people are calling Facebook's privacy violation was the tech media's echo chamber screaming "real-time search." Yes, take the current over-hyped BS (Twitter), combine it with yesterday's insanely successful business (Google), and that is the direction things must go in. And Facebook would be wise to get on board with the inevitable or risk loosing everything. But if they overdo it and sneakily encourage their users to act like attention hungry Twitter users (aka journalists), then they risk loosing everything via a backlash from violated users. Oh, and we're still waiting for either them or Twitter or Google to make bazillions with real-time search because won't that just be so amazing.

...right. I suppose that dismissing this concept now could be a bit premature, but, come on. It's been around for a while and has gone nowhere. Maybe when Facebook realizes that there's no money in this real-time search nonsense, they'll default everyone back to private. Of course, then the story will be that they rudely interrupted their attention hungry users' abilities to act like exhibitionists. And that is why Twitter will always have an edge.

It's nice to see somebody making an effective argument against those high-and-mighty OkCupid data lords. I've read a number of their posts, and they are actually quite careless in making assertions as though they are experts.

Anyone who works with data knows that subtle changes in how you define a metric can lead to drastically different findings. Ever heard the saying: "There are lies, damn lies, and statistics." In real science, you need to do everything possible to try to prove yourself wrong, and fail. They hardly seem to do anything so rigorous. They choose one metric, see what the outcome is - gasp, something sensational! Write a post about it.