Advertiser leaving Facebook after discovering that 80% of the clicks they’re paying for are from ‘bots.

I got this on Google+ today in the Hot Trends posts area.

"Advertiser leaving Facebook after discovering that 80% of the clicks they’re paying for are from ‘bots."

The post in FB from, https://www.facebook.com/limitedpressing/posts/209534972507958, points out how they did the tests to check if the clicks were real and they are valid (even then they could mislead).

Testing if a client has javascript will surely confirm that the user can have an analytics solution working. The remaining of the clicks can only come from either bots or mobile devices (phones). There is an old trick that you can do analytics so it works with mobile phones and that doesn’t require javascript. Either way, you would be able to verify if the source is a bot or not by checking the user agent.

Needless to say that a smartphone will run javascript so that will considerably diminish the odds of a non javascript click have come from a mobile device.

Can’t tell if what the post say is true, but if so, that doesn’t justify the means to increase clicks on an area with a low heat index.

This post actually made me want to run a couple of tests with FB just to see if it is true or not, therefore, I’m not in a mood to spend money on any of this.

What corporation doesn’t do hacks and breaks….

I love this quote about the whole Facebook IPO soul popper.

“Whether or not Zuckerberg needs to ditch the hoodie, Corpus thinks Facebook does need to change its freewheeling ways in some respects. The company “needs to move beyond its culture of hacking and breaking things and find the appropriate balance between innovation and reliability as a business platform for commerce, customer interaction, and advertising. It’s time Facebook transitions from a beta platform into a business platform ready for the next generation of growth,” he said.”

Seriously, what corporation never have placed a hack or broke something else in order of getting something done. I agree that if a hack does not work, you should not place it there, but throw the first rock who never placed a bad code in order to get things done in the appropriate time.

Let me quote Adam Savage here: “In science failure is always a option and constantly a necessary one.”

Hacking things is not a good option, but if you need to break out something in order to make it better, good thing you learned from it. No harm done.

More about the article: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2404202,00.asp

The Facebook Movie

I have just watched the Social Network Movie (Facebook). Quite interesting to see the whole history about the creation of the site that now is part of our lives as much as Walmart is (don’t tell me you don’t have an Facebook account -> as a developer, you must).

The movie throws an history about a couple of guys that back in 2003, in the middle of a very bad party (at least it semmed) had this great idea that was (or is) the next big thing (yeah right, what are 500 Million users nowadays right!?) and created a venture out of it.

The movie might have some gaps, but think about something:

1. A great idea still get’s people interested in
2. Those guys are geniuses (in one way or another)
3. If Facebook is “the thing” right now, what is next?

Regardless of anything, point is, a great idea still get’s people interested in and with the right resources (human or not) you might just be able to create the next big thing.

Now who has an idea? I’m bored and want to code.

Using the Facebook Javascript SDK

I have been messing with the FB API’s for a while to get that counter customized for us. The more I messed with the API’s the more I got the feeling that FB is not quite sure what is doing.

The Javascript API that we seen is the new Javascript API and it seems it is on Alpha release. The good thing is that with it we wont need anymore that .htm verification file for running cross-domain javascripts, but the bad part is that currently Goal uses for the fan badges the old javascript API.

New: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/javascript/
Old: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/oldjavascript/

I found a comment saying that if we are currently wanting to use the new API (Javascript SDK) we should fully remove the old references from the site and since it is on Alfa release the data functionality are still not ready. Besides this I was getting error after error when using the new API even after removing all old references from the application.

http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/JavaScript_Client_Library

The best way to keep track of the Javascript SDK from Facebook is by following the issues list at: http://github.com/facebook/connect-js and by checking on the FAQ. There is a lot of good information there.

Just a note, the Wiki is being deprecated. All the information that we should look are under the developers.facebook.com/docs.

Playing with the API’s, I have created a custom AJAX call using JQuery and JSONP. the JSONP allows a cross-domain request from Jquery AJAX and with that I was able to correctly execute a query using FQL.

The query is a parameter given to a url (http://api.facebook.com/method/fql.query?query=QUERY.) and it will return in either XML or JSON format.

Anyway using the query is pretty simple and if you want to give a test run of the results format before doing anything the best place is:

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/rest/fql.query

There is one annoying bug that I could go through with the new SDK, the SDK wont bootstrap giving an error at line 3. I think is related to cookies and the old API. I will still give a search on that and when I find the solution, I will place it here as an update.

Have fun.