Add Facebook to the list if linkable sites

[andrewducker]

Title:
Add Facebook to the list if linkable sites

Area:
Posts

Summary:
I can link to other DW users, LJ users, Twitter users, etc. Can we add FB to the list?

Description:
https://www.facebook.com/TheAndrewDucker links to me, for instance. I'd like to be able to use the standard DW user name=theandrewducker site=facebook.com to make this link work.

Poll #11605 Add Facebook to the list if linkable sites

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 66

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
24 (36.4%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
1 (1.5%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
21 (31.8%)

(I have no opinion)
19 (28.8%)

(Other: please comment)
1 (1.5%)

Comments

[msilverstar]

is there a reason not to do this aside from a general hatred of Facebook?

[musyc]

I constantly forget that FB has usernames now. XD I'd assume that most people who'd want to use this particular type of name-coding would know their friends' usernames rather than FB (randomly-assigned?) ID numbers.

I don't know enough about coding to determine if this would be a sticking point, but FB allows dots in their usernames. Would that cause troubles like the old issue with hyphens/underscores?

[matgb]

My ideal world solution is that OpenID gets another round of work done so that it can effectively be merged with Oauth and FB Connect to make a simple cross site sign on that allows easy interoperability, it was certainly part of the plan last time I was paying attention. At that point we'd need to be able to support whatever the agreed protocol was and make it easy for our users to refer to Twitter, Facebook and other off site IDs easily.

In the meantime, enabling this as a quick fix would be a workable plan and certainly make it a lot easier for those of us that have cross site discussions and mostly with people using "real" names and Facebook IDs.

[manifold]

We're not on Facebook, and to be honest, really don't like Facebook (the privacy issues, ugh), but it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to allow people to more easily link to Facebook users. It has the potential for misuse, but everything technically does.

But, of course, not being a Facebook user, this is a purely intellectual issue for me.

This may be totally barking up the wrong tree, but is it possible that the Diaspora Project might have useful code that Dreamwidth could make use of? It's open source, but I'm not sure how compatible the licenses are with Dreamwidth—I think Diaspora uses AGPL except for a few places where it's both AGPL and MIT License.

[azurelunatic]

A technical note: adding a site to the legion of can-make-a-user-link goes about like this:

Figure out what their user profile (& main space, if different) links are shaped like.
Figure out what picture to use for the userhead.
Copy and modify the relevant code from one of the other sites on the list.
Submit the patch and wait for someone else to check it for typos.

(Someone who has done this may be able to correct me on details.)

[stardreamer]

I'm not thrilled with this idea specifically because Facebook forces you to have an account before you can look at anything on it. (I'd have the same objection if you were talking about doing this for MySpace.)

Also, I do have a Facebook account, but I keep it on a VERY tight leash; I don't connect it to my other accounts, and I don't want anyone else to be able to do so either.