1. One of the creepiest visible things about Facebook IMO is contact prioritisation in the chat sidebar. Whenever a contact changes places, I think “what did I do to prompt that? What did they do? What maths told Facebook that would optimise my engagement with it? Is it trying to influence me? Am I being experimented on?”.

  2. Facebook chat is a mixture of exceedingly useful (if slightly creepy) features such as granular read notifications, but lacks the ability to mention a particular person in a group chat. In some ways, IRC is still way ahead in terms of these microinteractions and small feedback loops.

  3. Facebook use shady javascript to replace legit-looking link URLs with their own tracking endpoint.

    I made a browser extension which removes this: facebook-anticlickjack.

    It uses javascript to remove javascript from what should just be HTML. I call it “aggressive degredation”.

  4. Ugh. Facebook’s API is so un-webby. There’s no way of getting a public-facing URL from graph API JSON. Meh, the URLs will probably change soon anyway :/