Blaglash.com

Edit 6/4/08 - Jay from the Switchabit team has again proven to be very helpful and the problems seem at this point to be very creepy indeed, but not Switchabit related.  If Jay’s diagnosis (involving multiple IPs from my router) is correct, then their help has amounted to far more than content distribution hiccups.  Still excited for the final release and their api.

I was once one of the loudest champions of the new switchabit application.

As far as I can gather now, all of that is over.

Why?

Because today, when a new friend who is visiting from Holland attempted to befriend me on Facebook, something very, very, very creepy happened.

He logged into Facebook, and his entire news stream and profile had been overtaken by my feeds that are currently being routed by Switchabit.

He had apparently even added the Switchabit Facebook application to his Facebook profile.

I’ll have a screenshot up in the morning, but imagine if you will, Erik from The Netherlands, who I have just met, who I am not even friends with on Facebook, whose computer I have never touched, who has never touched my computer, who has nothing more in common with me “social graph-wise” than a shared wifi connection, with a profile filled with hundreds of my own tweets and even “just added!” pictures from my Flickr stream.

Fucking crazy.

Here’s what I know for sure:

1. This is incredibly unsettling.
2. As a crazy early adopter type, I don’t give two shits where my content flows, and Erik had a good sense of humor about it, but this is unacceptable and will ruin their service if not immediately addressed and patched.
3. If this is Facebook’s fault during their database changes, Switchabit still should have noted the problem and switched off the service in the meantime.
4. I know a beta test is a beta test, but this is the kind of amateurism any company can’t allow.

Long story short, the fact that our two computers sharing the same wireless network can completely merge our social identities is unfathomable, insane, and seemingly impossible.

It raises the question: What happens when I tweet from a coffeeshop?

I don’t know those people well enough to see the final destinations of my tweets, and the asynchrony is never noted to me.

I hope they’ve got a very, very solid explanation of how something this insane could even happen.