One of Facebook’s cute features allows one to have large threads that multiple people can reply to, even if some of the initial recipients of the first message are not added as a friend to any other person in the thread. This could translate into the thread continuing to be replied to for months, which is what is really bothering me.

Facebook doesn’t really want to help stop what it, in effect, spamming of friends. You could consider this feature to be some type of friend spamming mechanism, since every time a member of the message thread replies, you get an email from Facebook announcing it. As I found out, there isn’t even a way to unsubscribe from the thread – so if your friend’s friends are abnormal and find that a multi-recipient thread is the way to chatter about useless topics, there isn’t even a way to pull yourself out of the madness.

Here’s an email exchange I had with Facebook support:

from Facebook Support

reply-to Facebook Support

to ****@gmail.com

date Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 7:26 PM

subject Re: INBOX: A thread is sending me unwanted messages

mailed-by facebook.com

Hi Michael,

Unfortunately, the ability to remove yourself from a thread is not yet available. I am sorry for the inconvenience. Thanks for the suggestion. We will certainly keep it in mind as we continue to improve the site.

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

Jackson

User Operations

Facebook

—–Original Message to Facebook—–

From: Michael Perlman (****@gmail.com)

To: info@facebook.com

Subject: INBOX: A thread is sending me unwanted messages



User id: 516******

Description of problem: One of my Facebook friends sent a message to all of his friends (including me) at the time. Now, people originally brought into the thread are still replying, and I continue to receive unwanted messages (and emails from Facebook telling me about the replies, as a result). Is there a way that I can be removed from the thread?

Browser: Opera/9.50 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en)



—–End Original Message to Facebook—–

Supposedly, Facebook is known for being super-sensitive to some types of misuse of the site (case in point: Robert Scoble was suspended from Facebook for testing an unreleased data-mining tool from Plaxo, and many others have been kicked for sending a few too many messages or having too many friends), but from my experiences, they are way off bat in terms of keeping users from annoying each other.

The Lowdown: Basics of Using Twitter

The essence of using Twitter is quite simple. Sign up, give them your phone number, IM network ID, or both, and send a message to the service that tells your friends what you are doing.

Now obviously, most tweets aren’t directly saying what a person is doing. They could describe what he is thinking, who he’s speaking to, what funny picture he took recently, what video he uploaded or just watched on YouTube (and for the latter of those, as well as links to any site, Twitter integrates the TinyURL address shortening service), or just the fact that the person is awake.

Twitter for Interactive Communication

Much of the fun in Twitter is having conversations without having to set up a new environment for the “conversation instance” – no need to set up a chat room in AIM or the like. Just preface your thought with the “@” symbol followed by the name of the person you’d like to direct your thought toward. As a result, the person you addressed will receive your tweet, regardless of whether or not he follows you on Twitter. In essence, you can start a conversation with any person or group of people who is/are member(s) of Twitter.

The Addiction to Twitter

Part of using Twitter is being constantly involved. It’s quite obvious that if you tweet once a month you will end up being immensely un-popular within the Twitterverse. What many people end up doing is tweeting about anything and everything going on in their lives, in some cases almost every few seconds. In return, that person’s followers will reply, and make their own tweets, etc. There is a certain element of fun involved with being constantly updated of what your friends are doing. For me, there is so much that I almost got my phone taken away by my principal for receiving a text message from Twitter during school hours (despite that, of course, I receive dozens of them a day from those whom I follow). No wonder they call people like me Twitterholics…

Impact of Twitter on “Traditional” Social Networking

Twitter redefines social networking as we know it, mainly because the service primarily provides us with real-time updates of the things that our friends are up to. It’s provides a somewhat more personal relationship with people who we don’t actually know personally, because, essentially, we can have a one-on-one conversation with them without actually developing a real relationship.

Also, and this is strictly IMHO, the randomness of Twitter gives us a sense of relationship building. For example, I’ve been following Daniel Brusilovsky on Twitter essentially since I met him, and through both “@” replies and direct messages (a feature available to friends who follow each other), we’ve developed a much stronger relationship with each other.

In other words, Twitter provides a platform for connecting with people, not just “meeting” them. The terse nature of tweets makes forming connections faster and easier, and the real-time functionality brings us closer to those with whom we communicate.

The first new enterprise I’d like to introduce is the MichaelTech Podcast. Podcasting has only made sense to me for a relatively short while, during which I’ve listened to several tech podcast, like Leo Laporte’s This Week In Tech (TWiT), and Daniel Brusilovsky’s Apple Universe. Both producers have shown me the ropes (although not necessarily personally), and given me at least the technical skills required to record, edit, and publish podcast episodes.

Joining the MichaelTech Podcast is a companion blog. On the WOrdPress.com-hosted blog, I will be writing about recent tech stories and product releases as well as my own articles and tutorials.

Speaking of podcasts, I’ve joined Daniel Brusilovsky’s network of sites as the typed content editor. Most of my work in that area revolves around the fact that many people who write online don’t have particularly expansive writing skills. To make it short, I read over Daniel’s blog posts before publishing, edit them for spelling, grammar, and tidy up the HTML formatting in the posts (I keep telling Daniel that the Qumana blog editor for Mac OS produces atrocious HTML). It’s work that I’m quite sure is appreciated by both Daniel as well as all visitors to his sites.

Finally, live media has also taken a place in my mind, mostly thanks to Chris Pirillo’s 24/7 live broadcast. As you can see in the header navigation tabs, I’ve added a live page to the Educated Network site. That special page displays my UStream.tv broadcast channel, as well as a live chat room (powered by the WyldRyde IRC network) that anyone may participate in. If you’d like to join the chat, all I ask is that you follow WyledRyde’s community guidelines, which includes keeping the conversation clean and peaceful.

1. Chris uses the free program for Mac OS X called CamTwist to embed the chat in the video. The chat is rendered by an IRC client for Mac OS called Colloquy, and is embedded in the video stream using CamTwist’s picture in picture functionality. Both are free programs.
2. Ponzi is Chris’s wife, and Wicket and Pixie are his dogs.
3. Chris used to host of several television shows on ZDTV / TechTV / G4TV, most notably the show Call For Help, in which Chris managed to produce several bloopers (which made it to NBC’s 100 Most Outrageous Moments).
4. In general, Chris is an all-around computer geek/nerd/[choice of related adjectives]. He produces videos via his live show, runs the blogging network LockerGnome, and does a lot of other stuff I don’t quite know about (but still tech related). Type “what is chris” into the chat room at live.pirillo.com (minus the quotes) to get the official description.
5. Chris’s current computer setup includes a Mac Pro (with dual Intel Xeon quad core processors, of the January variety), two 30-inch Dell UltraSharp 3007WFP monitors, a 17-inch MacBook Pro, and a Mac mini (which is used solely for broadcasting the live video stream, and is connected to its own DSL internet connection).
6. Bonus #6: Chris’ chair is a Grahl Synchron 8. It’s outrageously expensive, as Chris tries to describe on video.

For comments or more questions, join the chat at live.pirillo.com or drop Chris a line at chris@pirillo.com (his public email address). “We’ll ‘e ya later!”

Web Worker Daily would like to know why…

2008 will be the Year of the Web Worker

In response, I’d like to say that 2008 will be the Year of the Web Worker because the office will be everywhere, meaning that it will be available through the Web and not physically constrained to one building. To illustrate this, my uncle (who is a lawyer and president of a condominium owners’ board) and my aunt (who basically works hand-in-hand with him) have had a Sprint EV-DO card that they use with their laptop for the greater portion of the year. With that, they’ve been working in New York (their hometown), St. Thomas, Los Angeles, and even Hawaii.

More recently, my uncle bought a BlackBerry. Needless to say, he has become addicted to it. (I explained to him what a CrackBerry is.) However, he still says that having one is like having your office in your pocket. The street is an office (he stopped to write some emails while walking with me this morning), a bus becomes and office, and an airline terminal transforms into an office.

In 2008, more and more work will be done through the web. Thanks to services like Gmail and GoToMeeting (which sponsors several of my favorite podcasts), as well as laptop computers and even more portable handheld communicators (like the BlackBerry and Palm Treo series handhelds), people can connect with anyone no matter where they are, whether it be across town, across the nation or even around the world.

In 2008, “anywhere availability” will be much more common. Prices for wireless Internet connection services will fall, and the number of people realizing the potential of teleworking will greatly increase (perhaps the announced 3G iPhone will help). My father is really putting his Verizon EV-DO card to work; he occasionally works from home on days he knows issues can crop up and keep him in the office longer than necessary.

Aside: If you answer WWD’s question, you could be win one of five Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Desktop 7000 sets, which consists of Microsoft’s ergonomically designed keyboard and mouse set.

Whatever Greasemonkey script was previously used to hack a search field is no longer necessary. The new option allows you to search and aspect of your feeds (starred items, folders, etc.), and even works in Opera (I’m a big Opera devotee, so, you know).

I’m anxiously awaiting the release of Joomla 1.5 Stable. Right now, it is up to RC2, which is very good progress. The Joomla team’s says that they will be putting out at least one more release candidate before the final version is ready, but I’ve got some time to spare. Keep it up Joomla!

If you already understand the concepts behind this, skip to the download link.

Let’s take a look at Rudd-O’s code again. Try to figure out what it’s doing:

1: <?php $homepage = get_settings('siteurl')."/home/";
2: global $wp;
3: $wp_received_argument = false;
4: foreach ($wp->query_vars as $k=>$v) if ($v) $wp_received_argument = true;
5: if ($wp_received_argument) require(TEMPLATEPATH . "/index.php");
6: else { wp_redirect($homepage);
7: exit(); } ?>

Line 1 gets the address of the blog and adds what we would use to access a static page with a slug of ‘home’.

Line 2 brings in the $wp object, which allows us to figure out if there are any parameters in the URL that we need to work with.

Line 3 sets a simple boolean value of ‘false’ to a variable that we will use to determine if we have recieved any parameters.

Line 4 looks at the $wp object and asks it if there are any parameters. If it finds any, then we set $wp_received_argument to ‘true’, and we will use that in the next line.

Line 5 is where the magic happens. If we have parameters, like the page number variable, then we will load the regular index.php template which will show you the normal blog page. Otherwise, we will continue to line 6 and 7.

Line 6 will run if we don’t have any parameters, which means that we want to show our special home page. We will send a redirect to the browser telling it to go to our static page. Then we quit running this page, since there is nothing more to do anyway.

This is a relatively simple concept. Rudd-O mentioned in his original article that one should add a link to /[wp-root]/page/1 somewhere, like in the header along with the page links for example. What that will do is give WordPress the parameters we need to have the blog listing shown. If you need help adding this link, leave a comment below.

Here’s the fun part. My hacks to Rudd-O’s code will replace the redirection of the original code. All HTML and PHP content is placed within home.php. Now that we are including our content in a straight-out PHP file, and not going back to the database to retrieve a page (via the WP Loop), you can even add a real mini-loop to your front page! You can do whatever layout you want with home.php now. (See my home page, which has the mini-loop, a list of categories, and my Flickr photostream, for an example).

Now that we understand what Rudd-O’s code accomplishes, it’s up to you to use your imagination. Until recently, my email that came upon request included some basic instructions, which read something like this:

Attached is a well-commented version of home.php. Use it to set up your custom layout, but don’t upload it yet.

In order for this to look and function properly on your site, you will need to adapt it to your theme. You will have to make the portion of home.php before my table-based layout look like the code in index.php from the top of the file to just before the loop, and from just past the loop until the end of the template. Remember to close the else statement with a right curly bracket.

Also, you will need to add the /page/1 (or ?paged=1 if you aren’t using pretty permalinks) link to the page list in header.php, which should include code to dynamically change the highlighting of the Home and Blog links.

For those basically familiar with PHP, HTML and some of the simpler CSS concepts, adapting the sample home.php file I am providing should be somewhat easy. If you don’t have such keen skills, you can review the W3Schools’ tutorials on HTML and PHP for a bit of help. (Sorry folks, these days I can’t handle doing the editing for everyone, although I wish I could.)

If you are convinced that you want a home page with a custom layout for your WordPress blog, I have provided an older version of my layout, plus all of the associated logic basedon Rudd-O’s code. As noted above, you will have and want to do lots of tweaking with it to make it look good, so grab the download below, and hack away.

 Download sample home.php layout »