Fire Island Blog

Following some discussion over at Mashable, we’ve set up a petition to encourage MySpace to consider a “Certified Safe Widget Developer” program. It may be a long-shot (I once waited 22 days for them to respond to a support request), but surely we have to try?

Please forward it to everyone in the community that you know and encourage them to sign. If we can rally enough people behind this we may get MySpace to make some concessions to a really important sub-economy that has emerged out of all this Web 2.0 malarkey.

Also, is anyone interested in collaborating on building a community site to raise awareness about the issue and to aggregate discussion and action towards overcoming it? After all, there’s strength in numbers…

UPDATE:

We’ve also set up a pledge at PledgeBank to raise interest in collaborating on the campaign site.

Peter Cashmore at Mashable is reporting that Cooqy has managed to bypass the recent MySpace Flash link blocking fix. Cooqy provides a Flash interface for searching and browsing eBay auctions and it would appear that their MySpace profile carries Flash widgets that (on my PowerBook at least, with Flash Player 9 installed) can successfully open new browser windows.

I’ve taken a quick squizz at the code and it seems that MySpace has not inserted the crucial allowNetworking=internal attribute into Cooqy’s widget embed code. Check it out:

<embed src="http://www.cooqy.com/cooqyMain.lzx?lzt=swf&debug=false&lzr=swf8" quality="high" scale="noscale" salign="lt"  width="500" height="600" bgcolor="#ffffff" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" flashvars="server=http://www.cooqy.com&title=<i>Cooqy</i>"/>


So what’s different about Cooqy’s code and why has MySpace interpreted it differently? Well for a start they’re using Open Laszlo to power their site and to serve the widgets, just take a look at the src attribute above. Another thing that’s different is the string they’re inserting with the flashvars attribute.

It’s the flashvars line that seems to be causing getURL() actions to work, even when Flash Player 9 is installed. On closer inspection it seems to be the extra italic tags inserted into the flashvars attribute that causes the MySpace code parser to fail and to not insert that crucial allowNetworking=internal attribute. I’ve posted an example on my own MySpace profile and those extra italic tags do the trick. I too have a Flash widget (sort of) that can open new browser windows.

Try it yourself, does it work?

UPDATE:
MySpace have closed this loophole now

Well, this is a bit of a blow for any company building widgets targeted at MySpace users. In order to prevent the spread of Flash based adware worms, MySpace are inserting code into Flash objects that stops external links working. The latest version of Flash Player 9 is required for this ‘fix’ to actually work and you can bet ya life that MySpace are actively encouraging users to upgrade, indeed MySpace’s own video service now requires Flash Player 9.

I’ve just tried it myself and sure enough, Flash objects that have a simple getURL action written into them, which opens a site in new window, now fail to work when they are embedded in a MySpace profile. MySpace are actually inserting an extra parameter into the HTML code that users embed into their profile, namely allowNetworking=internal which prevents the Flash object from any communication with the browser, the chief use of which is usually to open a hyperlink to a third-party website. Now, obviously these techniques can be used for nefarious means and MySpace wouldn’t be doing their job if they didn’t protect their users from malicious attack. But in doing so they have crippled a great many legitimate, honest service providers.

This is potentially pretty catastrophic for any company that is using MySpace as a way to spread the word about their product or service. We hope that Fantasy Festivals will fall into this category in the future, once we have built our Flash posters.

There’s more detail at Techcrunch… MySpace security measure disables viral spread of widgets.

There’s an interesting article in the Guardian Technology supplement today titled What is the 1% rule? which looks at “an emerging rule of thumb that suggests that if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will ‘interact’ with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it.”

The article references statistics from YouTube, Wikipedia and Yahoo Groups and suggest that “a site that demands too much interaction and content generation from users will see nine out of 10 people just pass by.” This is clearly something to take into account when designing the new Festival Builder app.

Yahoo have launched a new AJAX-rich homepage and they’ve taken the bold step of designing for screen resolutions of 1024 x 768. Good to see one of the big hitters recognising that things have moved on. I’ll take that as confirmation that we don’t need to worry too much about people stuck in the dark ages. (Until we get our own meaningful stats, of course).

Friendster has been granted a patent that covers online social networks. The company reportedly applied for the patent in 2003, long before its recent decline.

The wording of the patent is broad, vague and seems to cover the activities of a lot of similar websites out there. The patent refers to a “system, method, and apparatus for connecting users in an online computer system based on their relationships within social networks.” Whether we will see legal action from Friendster to pursue licenses from its competitors is not clear.

It seems that the patent’s main claim applies to networks that limit relationships to a certain number of degrees of separation, i.e: you can only contact a member who knows someone you know. However the patent could be made to apply to any social network, as it states that the maximum number of degrees of separation can be defined as any number.

More info at Red Herring.