controversy posts

Diggbar links now land on Digg instead of original sources

by Jay Hathaway Jul 19th 2009

Digg users recently noticed some interesting new behavior related to Digg's shortURL service, the Diggbar: instead of shortlinks going directly to their destinations, logged-out users who click them will now land on the corresponding Digg.com page. Sure, that's a lot of new traffic for Digg, but it's problematic because the change was never announced, and users who generate Digg links might not know where they're pointing.

Some folks are reasonably upset about the change, including Mashable's Pete Cashmore, who posted the headline, "Digg Just Hijacked Your Twitter Links." Mashable got confirmation from a Digg representative that the change wasn't a glitch, but was working as intended. After the Mashable post went up, though, Digg's Kevin Rose posted on Twitter that he had been on vacation and was not aware of the change. This story is still developing, but I suspect it will end with Digg going back to its old way of handling short links.

Tags: controversy, digg, diggbar, redirect, shorturl, tinyurl

Filed under: Business, Internet, News

Twitter's internal documents: stolen, boring

by Jay Hathaway Jul 15th 2009

Some internal Twitter documents were recently compromised by a hacker who offered them to various tech websites for publication. Other than the illicit way they were obtained - via some weak passwords set by Twitter employees, Biz Stone suggests in a blog post - the documents are pretty boring. TechCrunch, as you might expect if you're at all familiar with that blog, has gone ahead and published some of them anyway, because Twitter's financial projections and the details of the Twitter TV show pitch have "so much news value."

Most of the arguments against revealing this information have been made on ethical grounds, resulting in TechCrunch's Mike Arrington responding with a lecture about the history of news, and citing cases where published info has been obtained in similarly shady ways.

Fair enough. That's the news business sometimes, and Twitter can take action if they don't like the decision to publish. In fact, Biz's blog post suggests they're looking into it. "We are in touch with our legal counsel about what this theft means for Twitter, the hacker, and anyone who accepts and subsequently shares or publishes these stolen documents," he writes.

My problem with sites that publish this stuff is that it's ultimately pretty boring, and the attention and extra pageviews that come their way are because of the controversy, not because of some inherently interesting new story. The story here is "hacker compromises Twitter documents" not "we now know a little bit more about the Twitter TV show."

Wake me up when this is all over.

UPDATE: The hack wasn't due to weak passwords, says Twitter's Evan Williams.

Tags: controversy, documents, hacker, stolen, techcrunch, twitter

Filed under: Internet, Microsoft, Search

Bing addresses porn controversy with separate domain for explicit content

by Jay Hathaway Jun 16th 2009

The last time we talked about the uproar over Bing's live video previews including some explicit material, Lee was reporting that Microsoft had changed the default safesearch features to block porn. A week later, they've taken one further step to reassure concerned customers that they're not going to accidentally see XXX videos. Potentially explicit videos and images are now served from their own domain, explicit.bing.net.

They've also gone ahead and added the source URL into the query string. The average user's not going to look at that, but it makes things easy for corporate filters to just block anything with "explicit.bing.net" in the string. I'm not sure if this is overcorrecting for a mistake that, as Lee argued, wasn't that bad to begin with. It should definitely put to rest any remain concerns that Bing should be renamed Microsoft Live Porn, though.

Tags: bing, controversy, explicit, porn, safesearch

Filed under: Business, Social Software, web 2.0

Twitter responds to @reply uproar, announces changes

by Jay Hathaway May 13th 2009

After about a day with "#fixreplies" as a trending topic, Twitter has responded to the very vocal crowd of users who disliked their new @reply settings. Things aren't exactly getting changed back, but there will be a temporary fix, and then an improved version of the old @reply options on the way.

Here's what Twitter had to say about it:

First, we're making a change such that any updates beginning with @username (that are not explicitly created by clicking on the reply icon) will be seen by everyone following that account. This will bring back some serendipity and discovery and we can do this very soon.

Second, we've started designing a new feature which will give folks far more control over what they see from the accounts they follow. This will be a per-user setting and it will take a bit longer to put together but not too long and we're already working on it.

So, call off the dogs and wait to see what the new settings look like. Perhaps Twitter users will end up with something better than what they had in the first place.

Tags: controversy, fixed, replies, twitter

Filed under: News, web 2.0, Web

Twitter changes @reply settings again, users protest

by Jay Hathaway May 12th 2009

When the Twitter team was first figuring out how people liked to use the site's public reply feature, it introduced a set of three options for seeing @replies: you could either see replies to and from people you follow, from people you follow to anyone else (regardless of following), or no @replies at all. It was a decent system, and it gave people a choice about how much noise they wanted @replies to make.

Twitter has now removed the option, and the new default for every user is that @replies that are both to and from someone you follow will be visible, but other @'s won't. The change was announced in a blog post called Small Settings Update. The move appears to have been made because an overwhelming number of users had been using replies this way, but I'm already seeing a bit of a frenzy in my normally-calm Twitter stream from people who liked discovering new users by seeing their friends @ them.

Perhaps the recent popularity of Twitter as a way to contact celebrities -- we're post-Oprah here, people -- made users a little sick of seeing the people they followed replying to celebrities they didn't follow or care about. There's a fairly simple solution to that, though: change the @reply settings yourself. I'm not sure what Twitter gained by removing the option, but I'm sure it will become clear when they respond to the backlash. My prediction: the settings go back to normal by the end of the week, or we hear a much better reason for the change.

Tags: controversy, replies, twitter

Filed under: Audio, Fun, Apple, iPhone, Humor

Crudebox becomes Prudebox to make it into the App Store

by Jay Hathaway Apr 24th 2009

After I posted about the Baby Shaker iPhone app controversy, we got an email from the developers of a fart-soundboard app called Crudebox, telling their story of rejection from the App Store. Fart apps were the early targets of public outcry when Apple first started vetting software for its app store. They're obscene! Why do some get in, while others are rejected?

When Apple rejected Crudebox twice because it was too offensive, the developers decided to take a different approach. They reskinned the app as "Prudebox," leaving all the original sound effects -- farts, yawns, burps, vomiting -- in place, but replacing slime with flowers and bunnies. They also made some changes to the names of their sound effects: "Wet Fart" became "Big Toot."

Surprise! Prudebox, an app with the exact functionality of Crudebox, was accepted to Apple's app store. This might not be the most egregious example of arbitrary rejection we've ever seen from Apple, and it's not really a life-changing application, but one could make a slippery slope argument. Is a Big Toot really that much more acceptable than a Wet Fart?

If you're interested in having Prudebox for yourself, Alkali Media has a promo code that will get one randomly selected commenter a free copy. Sound off!

Tags: app-store, apple, controversy, crudebox, iPhone, prudebox, rejection

Filed under: Games, News, Apple, iPhone

Apple nixes baby-shaking iPhone app

by Jay Hathaway Apr 23rd 2009

Apple's policy of approving every iPhone app that goes into its store has led to delays for developers and plenty of controversy whenever a questionable app makes it through the process. The latest stir was over a "baby-shaker" app that was available in the store from Monday to Wednesday of this week before Apple pulled it, according to The Examiner. Apparently, the object of the game was to see how long you could listen to the crying of a cute illustrated baby before you would shake your iPhone to make it stop.

People were understandably upset. The app got quite a bit of news coverage before Apple was finally able to pull it, and there's been no comment so far about how it got into the app store in the first place. It's really hard for me to see the pro-baby-shaker side of this story. Even if you feel like it's just a game and people should lighten up -- after all, so many video games involve killing -- it still doesn't make sense for Apple to have let it pass, considering the much less offensive apps that have been removed from the store.

Tags: app-store, apple, baby-shaker, controversy, iphone

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