Facebook QR Code "me"-link

Jul 10, 2008 09:40

Facebook's public profile pages don't let you include any links (notably: no XFN "me" links), so you can't setup a bi-direction proof that you own your Facebook account from another page ( Read more... )

tech, hack

Leave a comment

Comments 30

mart July 10 2008, 17:06:36 UTC

Can you really "parse" the QR code after it's been resampled down to such a small size? I know it has error correction, but I'd expect that once you get below a certain image size it all degenerates into garbage.

(Or do you have some clever way of computing the full-size image URL from the thumbnail one?)

Reply

muerte July 10 2008, 17:19:19 UTC
How did you generate that QR code?

Reply

mart July 10 2008, 17:55:52 UTC
brad July 10 2008, 19:44:28 UTC
Updated my blog post.

Reply


xlerb July 10 2008, 17:27:43 UTC
In the absence of a QR decoding tool that isn't full of crack-weasels, I'll just take your word for it.

Reply


dblume July 10 2008, 18:08:12 UTC
It would be more practical to put a human-readable "bradfitz.com" in the image than the QR code. I doubt anyone would bother to process the QR code, until there's a FireFox plugin to automatically scan them in images and throw up links. (Sort of the opposite of Mobile Barcode.)

What you did is cute, but not very practical.

Reply

brad July 10 2008, 19:40:47 UTC
Well, I care about machine-readable.

Reply

bulknews July 10 2008, 19:55:04 UTC
All Japanese cellphones (besides iPhone 3G) can read QR code and open the web browser to access the site. It's quite common to put the QR code on ads in newspaper or trains.

Reply

dblume July 10 2008, 21:29:29 UTC
C'mon. What you care about is bi-direction proof that you own your Facebook account from an external page.

What you really want is an XFN "me" link.

This is a poor, poor substitute. Think about the workflow. Some stranger to you is at your Faceboook profile. If they're not browsing from their phone, and if my Firefox plugin isn't on their computer, they have to take a photo of their screen, then navigate to your domain on the phone, then to Facebook on the phone. (Or transcribe the URL back to the computer they were on.)

If they're already browsing to your Facebook profile on their phone, what's the workflow? Save the image, then ask a phone app to process the code in the image in the phone's OS and navigate to your domain? On how many phones can you do that? Most QR code processing apps are integrated directly with the phone's camera as the input device ( ... )

Reply


Spiderable? anonymous July 10 2008, 18:29:42 UTC
The way they smash your image down to a small thumbnail and encode it as a jpeg, it looks like that QR code might be illegible.

Have you tried to decode the image right from the public listing (which would be required for FOAF spidering)?

Cool hack tho :) Hopefully something similar will catch on.

Reply

Re: Spiderable? iamo July 11 2008, 00:58:33 UTC
Since this is a pretty facebook-specific hack anyways, translating the s to n in the url to make it a full size image is probably not too much of a stretch.

Reply


kvance July 10 2008, 18:54:07 UTC
Dude, steganographic watermarking.

Reply


Leave a comment

Up