I’ve been saying for years that Facebook is better than My Space, but Facebook has sunk to a new low for me.

Recently, I started catching up with a friend using Facebook’s Inbox service. Not a big deal, we sent a few messages back and forth (in fact, I talk to the majority of my friends on Facebook this way). I have always sent messages and in fact, a lot in a short amount of time.

Last night, I was doing the same thing. I havn’t touched my inbox in about 2 weeks and decided to start talking to someone again. Well, we talked. And talked. And talked.

Then I got a warning saying that I was exhibiting suspicious or inapprorpiate behavior that “others may find annoying”. I thought it was because I was using short sentences that may have sounded like a Spam bot or something but, alas, I was wrong. Before I had a chance to tell my friend to email me or something, they BLOCKED ME FROM SENDING MESSAGES.

This infuriated me, so I waited 24 hours to see if my account would be unblocked. It hasn’t. The specific error message was

You are blocked from sending messages due to continued overuse of this feature

Your failure to comply with an earlier warning has resulted in this block.

Continued misuse of Facebook’s features may result in your account being permanently disabled.

Which of the following links describes what you were trying to do? Clicking on a link will take you to more information on how to use Facebook’s features.

What the heck. So I click the I’m chatting with a friend link and it brings me to their help center on the subject.

It goes on to say that

Facebook has several features in place to limit the potential for abusive or annoying behavior on the site. One of these features is a cap on the speed and frequency at which a user sends messages to other users while using the Inbox.

Please note that even if all of your conversations were legitimate interactions with friends, our Inbox message service is not a chat client, and should not be treated as such.

As a recommended alternative, we suggest that you check out the Facebook Chat feature, which allows you to exchange real-time messages with your confirmed Facebook friends.

First off, I can see a spam bot or some one’s account getting hacked and seeing them being blocked, but, when a user is sending back replies to me, how does this justify “annoying or abusive behavior” on the site??

Second, they tell me to use their Facebook chat. I don’t want to use their Facebook chat.

I specifically lurk around Facebook and don’t want every person sending me a “Facebook IM” that has me as a friend.

I also am annoyed by three factors by this Facebook IM:

1. No Opera Support
   1. My browser (up until recently) didn’t have Facebook IM and it works buggy in my browser.
2. I don’t leave my tabs open for very long
   1. I don’t leave my browser window or tabs open very long. The Facebook toolbar at the bottom of my browser gets messed up when I have more than one tab open.
3. It doesn’t notify me on new messages.
   1. Well, it does—sort of. It tells you there is one, but, it does not make a sound, flash my browser window or anything else like MSN works. If I wanted to use a chat client to talk to my friends, I’d use MSN or another chat client. Not some piece of crap coding off their website that wont’ integrate well with my Trilly.

Furthermore, I feel Facebook is discriminating against me and forcing me to use their chat. I do not want to use their chat and am not a repeat offender of their inbox rules. I don’t come home and send out 43 messages daily, I did last night in the first time ever.

There should be a different system in place for this.

Until then, Facebook, you’re ON NOTICE:

EDIT: I should clarify that it’s not OpenID that should die, it’s MyVideoop. I’ve made corrections below to reflect this:

Lately, I’ve been having a lot of problems with OpenID by MyVideoop. The only place I really use this piece of garbage is on Twitter Feed. Twitter Feed, is the service responsible for updating my Twitter status (and subsequently my Facebook) whenever I post a blog.

I decided that I want to start using my Twitter Feed to start adding more things on my feed such as my Last.FM music scrobbles. I just wanted my recently played track to show up on my Twitter/Facebook every two hours to spruce up my Twitter.

Simple enough task, right? Wrong. I tried logging into Twitter Feed. It re-directs me to OpenID where I have to log in.

OpenID Videoop doesn’t use a password for “stronger security”. Instead, I have to pick images off their checkerboard of images (there’s like 12 images with categories, dog, cats, music, people, etc). Strike one against OpenID Videoop.

Well, I don’t use OpenID Videoop anywhere else but Twitter Feed. I always forget what images I have and guess what: The images change every time. Why can’t they stay the same? Strike two against OpenID Videoop.

I hit the “I forgot my picture combinations because your site sucks” button to send me an “authorization code” to verify it’s me. I enter it in, I pick my new images, and then hit save. I test it and it works.

This time I figure I’m going to beat the system. I wrote my three images down in order in an encrypted txt file for the next time I forget those damn images.

I set my Twitter Feed up for Last.FM and discovered it was posting URLs (I didn’t want this) so I tried logging in a half hour ago to fix this.

It forgot that it was me (could be related to me switching computers, but, roaming profiles should have kept my cookie, etc) so I tried logging in again. 

It said my combination was wrong, so I opened up my encrypted txt file to find my combination. I entered them in and guess what: It didn’t work!

Getting ready to throw something, I decided one more time to log in. This time, it flagged my account and wanted me to re-activate and start over FOR THE SECOND TIME TODAY.

I clicked the “re-send my code to me because OpenID Videoop is dumb” button and it gave me an error: Error sending out-of-band password. The final strike for OpenID Videoop.

Great, just what I needed. I can’t edit my Twitter Feed because it flagged my account because the site is so sucky in the first place.
Send me my email, OpenID Videoop. Until then, you’re on my own “On Notice Board”

http://www.thrfeed.com/2008/12/idol-format-cha.html

When will this show die?

Last week, I posted a blog (http://tinyurl.com/66ys8u) on why Picnik Sucks. I named several reasons on why I hated it. In a matter of a few hours, I had a comment from one of the staff members defending Picnik. 
I’m a strong supporter of hearing both sides so my biased views aside, I interviewed her.

How did you find my blog? Did you simply type in “Picnik sucks” on Google or what?
Haha! Well actually, one of our engineers, Steve, likes to keep tabs on the blogging, twittering, and other online chatter communities to see what people think of Picnik. He saw your comments on a tweet (www.twitter.com/tuckerm). Your blog post stuck out because even though you were less than impressed with what other users have done with Picnik, it sounded like you might be willing to learn more about it. You are clearly interested in photography and we wanted you to see what else Picnik can do for you besides crazy fonts and wild effects.

Second, I’d like to know how did Picnik started and why?
Bitnik was founded by Mike Harrington, Darrin Massena and Jonathan Sposato. According to Mike, “The three of us have had oddly parallel careers starting in the game industry in the mid 80’s, Microsoft in the 90s and then each of us founded startups post Microsoft (Valve, Spiffcode and Phatbits, respectively). During that time we occasionally found ourselves working together and thinking that someday it would be great if we could start a company.”

Why the name Picnik?
First and foremost, it looks awesome on our invites to the annual company “Picnik Picnic.” On our blog, Mike explained, “Our company name is Bitnik and our product name is Picnik. Originally, when it was just me and Darrin, we came up with Bitnik as our company name. It wasn’t until much later that we came up with the Picnik product idea and started assembling a team.” Picnik is essentially a combo of Picture and Bitnik, but where Bitnik came from is a bit of a mystery…

What features does it offer for the average person, and what features does it offer for someone who is good with graphics / Photoshop.
Great question. I would say a lot of our editing features make it easy for newbies. Auto-fix is a big hit, and pretty much all the rest of those tools: rotate, crop, resize, exposure, colors, sharpen and red eye make it easy for new comers to easily edit their photos to perfection. MySpacers and Facebookers are particularly fond of the features under the Create tab like the fonts, effects, and frames. You didn’t seem to be excited about many of these features, but from there it’s all about personal taste, which is how we end up with Picnikers like Katie, (http://blog.picnik.com/2008/06/featured-picniker-katie-mcdonough/) who love to use text and shapes, as well as those like Robert, (http://blog.picnik.com/2008/11/featured-picniker-robert-kruyskamp/) who use very little of either.

For the more advanced digital photographers we offer some great tools under the Create tab in the Touch Up menu, the Sandbox, and the Advanced edits. The Touch up tools can help you correct small blemishes or imperfections, the Sandbox (made possible by Adobe’s Flash 10) has some awesome effects created by external developers (for those math geniuses, you can even load your own Shader), and finally, the Advanced tools, Curves and Levels, give you a lot more control over the lighting and coloring of the photo. One of our other featured picnikers, Chase, claims to spending most of her time in the Advanced tools menu for the Polaroid, velvia, and early color fade effects (http://blog.picnik.com/2008/10/featured-picniker-chase-barrington/). We are also all incredibly excited about a Cloning tool that we are releasing in the next month or so. One of our programmers, Brian, loves to surprise us all by building awesome tools like that.

What’s your favorite feature of Picnik?
I thought it might come to this. Honestly, I’m torn. The effect I use the most is Cross-Process which is found in Effects or in Advanced, Curves with a few variations. But then again, I am loving on the new collages! If you go to the Library tab and hit Start you’ll see a number of options for awesome collage templates. If we’re talking about Premium features, I have to go with the layering tool: http://blog.picnik.com/2008/10/how-to-3-layering/ It’s a three way tie.

What are Picnik’s goals for the next few years?
Aside from world domination? We are striving to be the best photo editor online, but also bring photo editing to all sorts of people who’ve never done it before. We also want to offer an option to people who use more advanced tools like Photoshop. We’re very portable and take a different approach to UI design, we know that some will prefer it. Picnik is also integrated into many photo sharing sites such as Flickr, Photobox, Synthasite, Photoworks, Box.net and others. So we’re a convenient tool stitched directly into those sharing experiences.

Are you trying to obsolete current desktop photo editors such as Adobe Photoshop?
Similar to the above answer, we’re offering an alternative to Photoshop. There is a great deal of overlap in our feature sets, but also a great difference in our approach to building the application. Some will always prefer Photoshop, but we are there for everyone else.

Finally, what’s one thing you’d like people to know about Picnik??
We are a very small team of only 14 building an application that is just growing and growing in usage. We can’t believe sometimes that over 5 million unique visitors use Picnik every month. Seems like we’d need dozens of people to make that happen! But we love our jobs and work hard to make the magic all happen.

There you have it folks, both sides of the story. Some of the things Ali mentioned are some “premium” stuff; however, I’m inclined to try taking a second look at their website with a different attitude.

I will be doing some photo editing in the future, and, I will play around with Picnik a bit and see how I like it versus Photoshop.

I still love my Photoshop, but, for other users (particularly schools with lack of money in their tech budgets) this is a great, easy to learn alternative for people to try.

Dec 08 Desktop (Click to enlarge…)

Edit (Dec 13 20:39CDT): New Picnik post: http://blog.studio70productions.com/post/64729240/picnik-reloaded

Edit (Dec 5 17:37CDT): I’ve recently been contacted by Picnik and hopefully we’ll have an interview with them. If they do want to, I’ll be posting another blog post about it.

—-

I’ve seen a lot of Facebook users using this new tool called Picnik. Picnik is an online photo editing service. Currently it can import photos natively from Facebook, Picasa

Web Albums, Flickr, Yahoo Image search and also offers options to upload from a computer or to upload from a website.

I’m soooo sick of people using this website and thinking it’s the greatest thing in the world because it’s not. It’s gotten to the point where I’ve finally got mad enough, it’s time for a blog entry.

It’s something that people use because they don’t know how to use a decent photo editing program. With Picnik, everyone can feel like they are a 1337 image editor when they really are not.

As you can see on the upper right, I took a great photo of mine and added a great title, and an epic footer, but, it took a whole two seconds. If you want to see some real art, how about the picture to the left? I made that myself with my own image and my own time of photoshopping. Can Picnik do that? I think not.

So, for all of you who think you’re pictures are awesome, think again. There is far better pictures out there and you should be seriously considering actually putting some effort in a photo editing program. (More of Tucker M’s work can be found at http://tuckerm.deviantart.com/gallery/)

Epic win.