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Yeah Ok, So Facebook Punk’d Us
- tsally 17y agoGotta love tech company culture. :) On an unrelated note, why request a comment from a company at all if you're only going to wait 24 minutes for a response?
- colonelxc 17y agoWell, I imagine that if you are a tech news site that wants to be known for breaking stories first, you can't wait very long.
- tsally 17y agoIn one sense, this is why old print media is far superior to the mainstream online media today. You had to wait at least until the press started rolling the next morning before finalizing anything. A turn around time of days instead of minutes results in higher quality and accuracy in my opinion.
- rythie 17y agoI take it you haven't seen the U.K. tabloid press then?
- dagw 17y agoThe existence of bad newspapers to do not make all newspapers bad. When all is said and done I still hold that there is not a blog or web site around that can measure up to the best print media when it comes quality journalism and writing.
- jkincaid 17y agoI know this sounds ridiculous, but waiting 24 minutes is a pretty long time in the blogging world for something like this. Had it been something controversial or potentially damaging I would have waited longer and tried calling more people. But this was just a basic feature that was apparently live for everyone (at least, everyone in the TC office). I was really only contacting them to see if they had an explanation as to why they'd want to implement this.
- tsally 17y agoYeah, I can understand that. I wasn't trying to challenge your journalist integrity. As you noted, it wasn't a controversial piece. I was simply saying that trying for a comment in such a small time frame by email is pointless since a response in that time is very unlikely. I was thinking either a phone call or publishing right away as alternatives.
- jkincaid 17y agoActually Facebook tends to be quite responsive. They have a general press Email address that goes to something like ten PR people, so it isn't unusual to get a response within ten minutes (or at least a note saying that someone is looking into the issue).
- tsally 17y agoAh, then I understand where you were coming from. Definitely did not know that when I made my original comment. :)
- dc2k08 17y agoThe TC post does hint at a serious motive for the prank though. ...And something else about teaching us to contact them before posting.
- arithmetic 17y agoI love the fact that the feature (of faxing photos) actually works. Telling sign of true geeks.
- rhodin 17y agoYeah quite cool, hope they'll roll out this feature for all of us!
- hristov 17y agoOh its a basic journalistic trick. Each journalist wants to give the impression that they see both sides of each story. But if they have a hot story they really do not want to wait to hear the other side. So they request a comment, wait an unreasonably short time, and then print the story saying "we requested a comment from the other side but they did not provide a comment by the deadline for this story".
- jacquesm 17y agoExactly. Whenever you read 'did not return message seeking comment' or 'could not be reached for comment' you really should read 'we try to make it seem like we tried but they didn't care in order to make ourselves more important'. And it puts the pressure on the parties of who they 'request comment' to replay, knowing that if they don't that that dreaded sentence will be in the article, effectively a small component in the trial by media arena. There are other examples of such code phrases but this one is particularly annoying. As though everybody in the world should be at the beck and call of the media, and doing nothing is already a strike against you. Sure, if a politician stonewalls on a subject call them out for it. But don't use that phrase every second article in order to make it seem that the media are something you ignore at your peril. Plenty of people are loathe to talk to reporters simply out of - justified - fear of being misquoted.
- jacquesm 17y agos/replay/reply/ too late to edit. sorry.
- marcusbooster 17y agoIt used to be that there was a set deadline to respond because of a broadcast time or a printing run. A responsible journalist would call for a comment and if they weren't available they'd let them know when the story had to be done. So here we are when the "journalists" are controlling the printing runs and in this case they thought 24 minutes was a fair time for a response. I think this speaks more about the level of journalism practiced at TechCrunch than anything else, and this Facebook prank actually goes a long way to show that. What kinda baffles me is that all those old deadlines were set by management, the reporters always wanted more time to craft the story and get it right. There were epic battles between reporters and editors over time versus distribution. Now that there's instant publishing the reporters have the same itchy trigger fingers. Just like the before everyone's afraid of being "scooped".
- philfreo 17y agoTo be fair... I'm sure they would have updated the post as soon as an official FB comment came in. That's one thing good about online media, it can get better over time.
- swolchok 17y agoGreat! Will TechCrunch halt its bid to rename HN "Facebook News" now?
- jacquesm 17y agoI thought the bid was to rename HN "TechCrunch News". There can't be the most inane article on TC or it gets posted here.
- alaskamiller 17y agoGood to know 24 minutes is all you need to verify.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- jmorin007 17y agoAren't you supposed to be on a plane?
- alaskamiller 17y agoI'm multi-talented.
- jacquesm 17y agoIf being in two places at once is merely being 'multi-talented' then I think I'm going to have a little lie down now.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- JacobAldridge 17y agoWell, if a company with as much personal information as Facebook is going to pay people to 1) Delve into specific individuals' profiles, 2) Read enough information to make sure it's the right person, and then 3) Mess about with their settings, at least they did it with a sense of humour. Not so funny sequel - seeing "Zuckerberg told everyone in PR that you were easy" appearing on each of his ex-girlfriends' profile pages.
- smanek 17y agoIt sounds like they did it by IP (or 'Facebook Network' membership), not account. But everyone in the TechCrunch network saw it I'm not sure if that means TechCrunch's offices' subnet, or the Facebook network. But either way, no big invasion of privacy.
- jkincaid 17y agoProbably easier just to do it for everyone in the Facebook TechCrunch network, though it's possible that they used IPs.
- JacobAldridge 17y agoThat's a fair point. I guess my initial reaction was 'this is funny, but does that justify the means?'. If it's easy enough to do then the means aren't controversial. Punk on!
- Alex3917 17y agoI've heard of companies doing this to their competitors. It's a great trick... Announce new lower prices that only your competitors can see, and then laugh when they send out an email to all their customers informing them of the new pricing structure. Or else announce a stupid new feature, and watch them waste time trying to implement it on their site too.
- snprbob86 17y agoThat's funny. Is there a particular story to share? Do you have a link or source?
- Alex3917 17y agoI can't find the story in his blog archives so I'm going to assume it's not public, but it is a real story. The funny thing is his competitors got back at him by renting his exact same office after he sold the biz. This way they were getting a good chunk if his mail to use for leads!
- raganwald 17y agoCertainly. Microsoft announced that OS/2 was the future and watched as Lotus and Wordperfect spent millions porting their apps to the new oS. Then they cobbled Windows 3.x together and ported their own apps to that instead of OS/2. (The wikiedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2#Breakup http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2#Breakup makes no mention of the effect of Windows 3.0 on Lotus and Wordperfect.)
- doty 17y agoThis was not actual Microsoft strategy; until the Windows team destroyed OS/2 Microsoft had every intention of making OS/2 the future. Windows was really just a project that refused to be killed until it won.
- alex_c 17y agoAmazing. This is officially my favorite TechCrunch post. The best part is that the feature actually worked. If a prank is worth doing... it's worth doing well :)
- pavs 17y agoYes, even facebook (along with most of the rest of the tech industry) thinks techcrunch is such a joke that they don't mind pulling pranks on them. Notice that there are bigger/better tech blogs/publications out there but facebook choose only to prank them - that's how low they think of techcrunch. And they should.
- drusenko 17y agoi would think it's exactly the opposite -- being individually signaled out and pranked by facebook is more a sign of TechCrunch's importance...
- vijayr 17y agoIf they thought TC was a joke, they'd ignore them, not spend time and effort, planning and executing a prank.
- metachor 17y agoNot unless they think that TC is a bad joke that does harm to FaceBook in some way (by, for example, posting unverified stories about FaceBook before taking the time to fact-check with FB).
- sriramk 17y agoThe part I love is that they made the feature work and actually faxed the photo over. Lots of effort for a prank. Thats what makes the best pranks stand out :)
- netsp 17y agoThat is slightly suspicious. Maybe somebody at facebook actually thought that this was a good idea at some point and had developed it as a feature.
- snprbob86 17y agoMore likely is that the fax was manual after clicking the link did this: send_email(to='prankster@facebook.com', subject='FAX Prank', body='Photo ID: %s\nUser ID: %s' % (photo.id, user.id)) But, you know... in PHP, not Python :-)
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- drusenko 17y agowith efax you can send a fax with an email, so really sending an email to a person and having a fax sent is the same amount of work.
- heycarsten 17y agoAbsolutely awesome! Hubris bites back!
- mynameishere 17y agoCan somebody explain to me why this article was written/posted/upmodded/commented upon/any of the above? Serious question. ED: So...you can't answer the question, but you can click the down arrow? I always find that strange. I'm really puzzled as to why HN is lately polluted by the 3rd-gen friendster copycat facebook, and this latest post just seems to add that many more layers of derivation, all leading to...? I don't know. What's the point? Serious question, as I said, if that matters.
- gaius 17y agoElaborate pranks are appealing to hackers.
- pyre 17y agoSee also the Cal Tech vs MIT rivalry. That's very hacker-oriented.
- kristiandupont 17y agoYou are being downvoted because despite your claim, your question is obviously not serious.
- rms 17y agoThis site likes humor that is actually funny. This is actually funny. It's also a prank against Techcrunch, which this community loves to hate. Of course the irony is that it is still pageviews to Techcrunch.
- turtle4 17y agoWhy do we love to hate Techcrunch? I missed the memo, apparently...fill me in.
- thaumaturgy 17y agoThere are some positive aspects to Techcrunch: they generally do a good job of keeping tabs on a vast field, and Crunchbase is an impressive and useful effort. But, their particular brand of "pretendo journalism" rubs a lot of people the wrong way when they publish news without doing basic fact checking, and they tend to publish a little too much gossip and rumor. Take Business Week and mate it with the Enquirer, add some "web-2.0"ness, and you've got TechCrunch. I can't speak for anyone else, but I do not love their Enquirer bits.
- netsp 17y agoFrom the comments: Matt Harwood: I call hoax. There is zero way Facebook would even consider this, nor use that god awful over-sized icon. Jason Kincaid: It’s not a hoax, I’m seeing it when I browse photo albums. Might now be rolled out for everyone yet.
- jacquesm 17y agoWe once pulled a stunt like this on a remote co-worker whose IP we figured out. Eventually we did get to be on speaking terms again ;) Maybe at TC they'll learn the value of cloaking and a pc that is not on the 'known corporate network' to fact check their scoops ? If not I expect there will be a few more pranks like this. They must be howling with laughter in the Twitter offices right now, and plotting their own version, the subtle part here is the timing.
- jimmybot 17y agoIs it me or does it seem that Facebook is working hard to generate a lot of news/publicity these past few days? What are they looking to accomplish?
- PStamatiou 17y agoDamn this just made my night. Thank you Facebook.
- ivankirigin 17y agoIf I didn't already want to work at facebook, I would now.
- dbreunig 17y agoAnd Facebook makes $1.50 off TechCrunch. They should do this more often.
- helium 17y agoJust for a second imagine if this somehow went wrong and this 'feature' was suddenly available to everyone. FB realises the mistake quickly and pulls it, but there is a vocal outcry from all their users who just got into the whole 'Fax your profile pic' meme. Also, TC is first to pick this up in a blog post. Yeah OK, this is probably highly unlikely, but it would sure have been funny.
- dunk010 17y agoMan, this is brilliant. A long time coming.
- rapind 17y agoSo... you're saying I won't be able to fax from facebook? Crap.