Facebook reverse psychology on privacy

I have recently taken a few weeks off work to travel back to my home country to catch up with friends and family, and soak up some of the Rugby World Cup hype.

When it came time to look for contact details for various friends who I hadn't seen for a while, I ended up resorting to Facebook messaging.

A while ago Facebook opened some loophole which allowed me to see contact phone numbers for anyone who I was a Facebook friend with.  I quickly thought of that as a not-so-good idea and opted out, but recently I have been thinking this may have been a cunning ploy by Facebook to ensure that Facebook messaging becomes the primary means of communication for situations such as mine.

One of these days I will probably leave Facebook, as it is becoming too ubiquitous so must inevitably be avoided.

What a difference a name makes

I've started working on an application to allow people to manage their Facebook groups from outside of Facebook, as a hobby project to keep my skills fresh while I am between roles.

This morning as I was writing some tests and expanding the application to the point where it would be ready to start interacting with Facebook, I found myself feeling uneasy about the structure of a Service.

The method needed to know about a few fields that I have already encapsulated elsewhere. I found myself wondering, do I pass in the entire object or should the object actually be responsible for calling the method and passing its member fields as parameters?

After a few minutes of umming and aahing, the penny dropped and I renamed my "Service" class to be a Gateway. The way that the call gets processed should have made it stick out like a flashing neon sign that this is a gateway.

Having an organisation object make calls on the gateway, rather than being passed as a parameter into the gateway seems cleaner, but I expect another aspect of the domain that I have yet to uncover will move the responsibility out of the organisation object. Of course day 1 of the project is probably a bit early on to get concerned about this sort of detail.

This is yet another reason why Martin Fowler's Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture lives on my table, rather than my bookshelf.

Get rich quick scams advertising on Facebook

Since I tried tricking the context-sensitive advertising system into not showing me all the dating sites, I have noticed quite a few advertisements that looked to good to be true, in other words scams.

Out of curiousity I have clicked on some links and found that they show up as a fake site designed to give the appearance of an online newspaper with a journalist's report on their "product".

If you see a site asking you to pay a small fee to get a package explaining how you can make thousands of £s (or $s) by using Google from home - know to avoid it. It's just common sense, that when these people go out of their way to mislead the public they are up to no good.

I have read about some people being foolish enough to give their credit card details - and then seeing monthly charges that they had not approved, or had missed in some obscured "terms and conditions".

Be sure to report such misleading advertising if you come across it on Facebook etc.