Geoff on… technology

Facebook finally released their chat functionality to all their users today. It’s fantastic! I quickly came to the conclusion that it did have one major flaw: you have to be on the Facebook page to see any incoming messages. So to solve this, I quickly knocked up a Firefox add-on to alert you if you have any new chat messages. You can download it here.

It uses the built-in Firefox alert system, so you’ll need Firefox 3 on OS X (for Growl) and 2 for other OSs. At the moment you also have to leave the Facebook page open, if I have time later, I’ll deal with this so that you can close the Facebook page.

One of the most common ways for a Facebook application to spread is through users inviting their friends once they have installed it. Unfortunately, this has lead to some pretty dubious practices (i.e. spam) to force people to invite others. The Facebook API team have responded by removing requests from the API, and more recently, allocating a maximum number of requests you may have per user based on how “spammy” your application is.

It uses metrics like how often people choose to “ignore, hide and report notifications as spam”. This is an interesting way to suppress spam applications, but there have been reports that things can be difficult early on because a single ‘ignore’ will be more statistically significant. Based on the metrics, your application gets placed in one of 9 buckets for notifications and 13 buckets for requests, each bucket having a “limit threshold” which is the maximum per user per day. I’ve put together a table showing these based on a number of forum posts:

Notifications

Requests