I recently became addicted to PathWords, a game on facebook. At the start of each game, you’re presented with a beehive of 52 letters, and within that beehive you must find hidden words. Each letter of the word must connect to form a path, however convoluted, and each letter may only be used once.

Color me amused when I came across this.

I am the epitome of maturity, aren’t I? In my defense, it was almost 2 a.m. and I just got over a case of the giggles a few minutes earlier.

It’s too bad the word wasn’t legit. That would have been a good chunk of points.

If you’re looking to waste a little time with Scrabulous on facebook today, don’t bother. The social notworking site pulled the popular application, which was basically an unauthorized version of Scrabble, for users in the U.S. and Canada.

Hasbro, in a slow rush to cover their own ass, sued the creators of the facebook app and demanded facebook remove the copycat game under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The official Scrabble application appeared on facebook earlier this month, in a move I consider “too little, too L-A-T-E.”

When time permits, I’ll give the official version a try, but if other official versions (read: computer and iPhone) of it are any indication, the game will have my attention for all of 5 minutes at any given time. There are just too many bells and whistles — animations in particular — that annoy me enough to render it unplayable after a short amount of time. That’s where Scrabulous shined — there was no excessive cruft.

Update: And now, it looks like I needn’t bother trying it out for a while. Hasbro shuttered their own application. This is totally how not to release a product and endear yourself to the masses after shooting down the little guy.

Pieces of Flair is one of those cute but ultimately useless applications available on facebook. (Yes, I have it on my profile.) Every now and then, I come across a piece like the one pictured at right. I direct your attention to the last two words.

YES YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO YOUR OPINION AND I HAVE THE RIGHT TO THINK YOUR STUPID [sic]

Irony much?

I popped on facebook this morning to send a friend in Canada a congratulatory facebook gift. He and his partner — both American expatriates — got married this weekend.

Color me bemused when the first page of available gifts pictured above showed a gift of $100 (last one on the second row). It’ll only cost you $1, unless you purchased one of those 10-gift packs for like $6 or something, then it’ll be even less. Either way, I find some great irony in that given the current state of the American economy.

Another friend of mine sent me a facebook gift last Tuesday: a free cone commemorating this year’s Free Cone Day at Ben & Jerry’s, an event I once again missed out on mostly because my time these days is too valuable to stand in line for an hour just for a free ice cream cone. That would be like working for less than minimum wage. I did make it to my nearest scoop shop on Saturday though, to try out a new flavor introduced on Free Cone Day — Imagine Whirled Peace.

I considered the cone — and the mostly liquid lunch that proceeded it — a reward to myself fr participating in the Greater Washington Servathon as part of Team DCist. Our assignment was at Harriet Tubman Elementary School in Columbia Heights. After the lot of us were divided up into teams of 5 or 6, my group headed upstairs to a classroom to paint the lockers within it a particularly bright tint of green.

The picture doesn’t do the paint justice. I mean it was really bright.

Here are two from the “Oh no they di’n't” files.

First up: Google.

Now, I love the fact that they recognize days of note, from mainstream holidays to more obscure events, via their homepage Doodles. The overly pinkified Google Docs homepage is a bit much, though. To quote a particular movie, it “looks like it’s been hosed down with Pepto-Bismol.”

There’s way too much attention to detail there. Unstarred documents have little broken hearts next to them. It’s an eye roll inducing spectacle of a page.

After the jump: a facebook ad that made me do a Danny Thomas spit take.

As I logged into facebook on Thursday night, I noticed that one of my friends (of the I’ve-known-you-a-while-and-think-you’re-teh-awesome variety) added Global Orgasm Day to his events. I clicked the link, read the description, and decided it might be a lark to add it to my events, so I did.

Whenever you add an event in facebook, it changes the “Add to My Events” link to one that reads, “Invite People to Come.” Given the context of that particular event, I got a mighty good giggle-snort out of it, but not an orgasm. It’s hard to do that when you’re otherwise under the weather like I was when I added it to my events.

And in case you were wondering and didn’t bother to click the link above, Global Orgasm Day is to take place at the time of the solstice; that’s 1:08 a.m. on Saturday, December 22 here in DC. (If you’re not on the American eastern seaboard, check for your local time.)

* … You’re just expected to come!

I like to pop into facebook every now and then. Not everyday, though; who has time to go through all those application requests?

Since I don’t log on every day, I often have a backlog of notifications and messages to wade through. What surprises me most, though, is the long list of “pokes” I received from different people. Pokes are to facebook what nudges are to LiveJournal and twitter, a way to get a specific user’s attention. But “poke” has sort of a different connotation to it. It’s almost sexual.

Okay, fuck “almost” — it is sexual! While I always giggled like a 9-year-old on the inside about poking people on facebook, it wasn’t until I found the “Enough with the Poking, Lets Just Have Sex” group that I realized some people do take it sexually. As of the moment I write this post, I am one of 339,566 members in the group. (What? You thought I was above joining it?! Please!)

Judging by the list of eight pokes I received when I logged in, I take it people fancy me pokeable, and that’s just a dandy piece of validation if I do say so myself.

Last week I mentioned that pxPipe took its service offline. (see PxPipe Goes Down the Tubes) I dropped a note to alwaysBETA. Sean from aB promptly responsed (This is a gesture I always appreciate, by the way.):

All of the aBers with iPhones are now uploading directly from their phones to [Facebook] via email with no problems.

I can’t speak for the others, but I have my phone configured with my gMail address and it still works…

If you’re having issues, you should email Facebook support and ask them what’s up. At any rate, their upload method now works for us and is better than pxPipe was since it tags photos specially as “mobile uploads” with a little icon and puts them into your profile and albums without the need for approval. It just wasn’t worth it for us to maintain our service anymore since we don’t need to use it anymore.

Fair enough, and I should have contacted Facebook to begin with. A snippet from “Sam from Facebook’s” response:

Please try sending the email message with the mobile photo to your
special email address: y——–fbookpix.com. [ed. note: address altered for security]

If you still are not receiving a confirmation code, please let me know.

Now, I had tried that earlier, but to no avail. Because I’m insane, I tried it again.

Wouldn’t you know? It worked! I guess Sam (or someone just as important) made a tweak and I could email photos from my iPhone to my Facebook account. The results are a little inconsistent, though. Sometimes a photo shows up in my account right away, others it takes a day or so. No matter — the system works and I ain’t rockin’ the boat no further.

Sean and Sam were responsive and helpful to my needs. Who says customer service is dead?

One of my favorite web-based iPhone apps is pxPipe, a utility that allows you to upload photos to a facebook account via email. (Why facebook doesn’t already allow one to upload a photo by email is beyond me.)

Wait, that opening sentence should be completely past tense; the pxPipe service was discontinued. I guess it happened recently based on an intomobile entry from last week touting the then month-old service.

I dropped a note to alwaysBETA, the creators of pxPipe:

I ventured over to pxPipe.com and found that you’ve discontinued the service stating, “Facebook now allows photo uploads from arbitrary email addresses.”

I think you may be mistaken here. I attempted to send a photo from my iPhone to my Facebook account to mobile@facebook.com and photos@facebook.com; both times I received this automated response: “Sorry, we cannot support uploads sent via email. You sent from GMail. If you are sending from a phone, it must be configured to send directly.”

Those email addresses only work with MMS messages. As you probably know, iPhones have SMS capabilities, but not MMS.

PxPipe was a great tool and there’s still a need for it; I hope you guys reconsider your decision.

Cheers,
-Fredo

We’ll see what happens.

These are my links for 26 Jun:

• Do you have to be gay to tell another guy his eyes are pretty? (Salon Life) - My gaydar says my good-looking co-worker is gay, but he pretends otherwise.
• At Yahoo, being paranoid comes with the job (CNET News.com) - To Arturo Bejar, the name of Yahoo’s security team made perfect sense when he came up with it eight years ago: the “Paranoids.”
• Machinist: Tech Blog, Tech News, Technology Articles - Salon - Tech researcher danah boyd explains the chief cultural differences between two uber-popular young people’s social networks.