gif – @xuv writes

I finished Facebook #orSoIThought

On May 27th, I’ve finished The stupidest game on Facebook. I was silently running this little self-amusing game since the 15th of May and then, later on, opened the process publicly. In the end, it took me less than 15 days to fill up to 99 the most famous 3 icons that you find on the top right corner of Facebook… on a desktop browser.

So that’s what it looks like. No cheating. No Css rewriting. No photoshopping. And as a proof, I was screen grabbing the page every 2 hours from the mobile version of Facebook. (Actually, I did not set that up for this project specifically. It is a part of my LoveMachine project, which has been running for more than a year now: I take a screenshot of Facebook every time the bot runs, mostly for debugging.)

So today, I looked for the first time at all these screenshots and especially the ones corresponding to this period and to my surprise, I’ve found out that the stupid game does not work at all on the mobile version of Facebook. If the highest score on desktop is clearly 99, I have no idea what the limits are on mobile. (On the top of this page, you can see the gif created from all the screenshots.)

This is of course very disappointing. It makes the game a little useless, or at least, not multi-platform, as games should be these days.

Anyway, I guess that closes the challenge. I have other plans for the monster than trying to reach 999 or whatever the limit is on mobile. If any of you is up for the mobile challenge, please drop me a line. I’d be interested to see your results.

As a happy note, and to close this chapter, I found out that when the score of unread private messages reaches 99+ in the desktop browser, it resets the counter by itself. Which, to me, is obviously a bug. So, as a joke, I posted a status about it and tagged the Facebook Design team in it.

They replied.

lvMchn_560.gif

Just submitted this gif to the Transnumériques – Videoformes 2015 award.

This gif is a compilation of screenshots done by the [loveMachine] over the course of 6 months. All selected pictures contain Facebook error messages.

The [loveMachine] does screen captures every time it runs. Because the script works as a screenless process, this visual feedback allows me to understand what it is actually doing on Facebook and helps me adapt the script accordingly.

Sometimes, Facebook throws those warning messages whether I’m liking too fast or too much, or if a post has been deleted while I’m trying to like it or just when Facebook bugs a little also.

All these assembled into this stroboscopic animation shows us how similar, boring and surprisingly anarchic these messages can be. One would expect that Facebook has strong graphical requirements on how to display a warning message. But these captures done over a long period of time shows that both messages and layout may vary a lot over time.

Facebook error messages, as a timelapse animation, shows us how unstable the platform is. It’s a constant evolving organism of which we can barely see the changes when used at “normal” speed.

A facebook warning animation

Everytime the [loveMachine] runs over my profile, it takes a screenshot of the page when it’s done. At first, it was a way for me to see if it was really doing its job and to catch the Facebook warning messages that might have appeared during the process. But since a couple months now, I’ve just been collecting all the ones that display warning messages.

Here it is, in a gif compilation, 120 facebook warning screens.