Unhandled page fault on read access to 0x00000068 at address 0x7bc34e57

After lots of fruitless digging around, I discovered that the issue is with the Facebook integration!

The fix is simple. Visit the Facebook Applications Page, remove Spotify.

I’ve noted this error on the WINE Site.

If you’re a premium Spotify user, you can run their Linux Preview of Spotify

My partner and I, like many married couples, live together.  We speak over breakfast, commute together and send each other emails and texts throughout the day.  But we don’t do any of this on Facebook.

This worries Facebook.  It thinks our marriage may be on the rocks because we haven’t – excuse me – “poked” each other for a while.  Facebook knows the key to a successful marriage is to tag each other in as many photos as we can.

At least, that’s the only reason I can think for what I saw when I last logged in to Facebook.

Click to Embiggen

THANK YOU FACEBOOK FOR SAVING OUR MARRIAGE!

Grimly, we can apply this as an analogy to our real life social networks. If your good friend Fred were to suddenly die – you could still contact all your other friends. You could even contact – with a bit of effort – those people who you only ever saw in Fred’s company.

With online social networks, the result is a little different. Twitter and Facebook hold all your information about your network. Who you know, how you know them, how often you chat and what you’ve said. All fine and dandy – but there’s no way for you to own that information.

If you want to leave Twitter or Facebook, it’s rather difficult to extract all the information – and metadata – from there. You are beholden to them.

If, one day, your social network goes bust, or closes down or wants you to leave – you are screwed. Hope you made a back up. Oh. Wait. You can’t.

You are at the mercy of benevolent dictators. If Twitter runs out of cash – tough. If Facebook kicks you out – tough.

What is needed is a decentralised social network. You should own your network and its data. You should be free to move it around or do whatever you like with it. You should not have to rely on a 3rd party.

I envisage a situation where people have their own website (be it co-located or sat under their stairs) onto which they install Facebook, twitter et al.

Let’s take the example of EdeNet – my imaginary social network.

On your server, you have a database of your friends and family with associated FOAF data.

You install EdeNet on your server. It looks at your friends data and queries their servers. If it finds Alice also has EdeNet installed – it will prompt you to hook up with her. You can then do whatever EdeNet lets you do (chat, send pictures etc). Perhaps EdeNet even lets Alice store some of her data (encrypted) on your server. This way, if something happens, she can reconstruct her entire social network from the cloud.

Of course – there are two major problems with this.
1) Back Up. The major social networks invest a lot in infrastructure – you do not. Backing up in the cloud is a partial solution.
2) Cost of hosting. Hosting is expensive. Especially when you want a high bandwidth, always on, backed up solution.

This would lead people to host their social networks on… you guessed it! Unreliable 3rd parties.

What I’m really getting at, is that people need to make sure that they can extract and reconstruct their social network should their network provider turn malicious, go bust, or if they simply fancy a change of scenery.

Products like Zyb* or Funambol are a good start. Your social network is, essentially, your address book. You can store it on their servers, sync it to your phone, shift to another provider, or simply save it on your local disk. If you want to take it back from a 3rd party, you can.

So, ask yourself these. How safe is my data? If my favourite social network service closed without warning, how would I cope?

Finally, what’s to stop my social network from banning me and locking me out of my data?

Happy 2009.

TE

*I work for Vodafone. Vodafone owns Zyb. This isn’t an official Vodafone blog.

I loved Scrabble and attained the heady heights of school champion!

But it wasn't enough. I had tasted power and wanted more. I devoured Scrabble strategy books, word lists, reverse dictionaries and spent the nights dreaming about triple word scores.

I even went to the regional finals where our team came second to some suspiciously over-developed "school boys" from Westminster.

My love of scrabble stays strong, but I haven't dusted off my tiles in years.

All of which leads me to Hasbro/Mattel and their war against Scrabulous. I've never used the Facebook app – but I think I might take it up, just to spite them.

Old companies have a very hard time adjusting to the Internet way of doing things. There are two reasons for this…

1) Hasbro/Mattel exist in a nice and cosy status quo and don't want to take any risks. They're making a solid amount doing what they've always done, so why innovate?

2) The innertia of old companies weighed down with processes, multiple stakeholders, vested interests and office politics is staggering. It amazes me that Google and Apple can seemingly think of an idea on Monday and have it released on a Tuesday. Meanwhile, it's Thursday and I'm stuck in a meeting discussing whether the meeting to arrange the logo placement on the report exploring the possibility of designing a new application should be held in May or June.

Does Hasbro/Mattel have the legal right to sue Scrabulous? Undoubtedly. Some company is infringing on their work and not paying them. That's lawsuit time.

Do they have a *moral* right to sue? Scrabble was invented 50 years ago – I certainly think it should now be in the public domain.
Hasbro/Mattel haven't taken up the new economy and released an online version of any of the games. They've dropped the ball and, as always happens in this capitalist society, someone has picked it up and started playing with it.

Hasbro/Mattel can't simply buy Scrabulous and slap their branding on it – that would open the floodgates for thousands of rip-offs each trying to get bought out.
They can't sue them out of existance without generating a lot of ill-will.

So what can they do?

1) Fire whoever runs their Internet Division (and their heavy-handed legal team, for that matter)
2) Create an official version of Scrabble for Facebook. Make it so good that people would rather use it than some knock off.
3) Create social games that work across the Internet. Invest heavily in this new world. Put all their existing games online and develop great new games specifically to be played online.
4) Encourage Scrabulous to ceed to the Official Scrabble Facebook app. They shouldn't pay them off, they should obliterate tham with a better product, better marketing and a better experience and, maybe, the hint of a lawsuit.

Of course, what they'll *actually* do is sue, create a storm of negative publicity and reap the rewards of the Streisand Effect

http://wapedia.mobi/en/Streisand_effect

Right. I'm off to install the Scrabulous app – who wants a game?