Loopster is a web service that will supposedly bridge your accounts on MySpace, LiveJournal, LinkedIn, Blogger and Facebook. I can't get the goddamned thing to work, so I'll just take their word for it. TechCrunch hailed it as a mini-revolution happening to the social web, but TechCrunch is one step above that "boys have a penis, girls have a vagina" kid from Kindergarten Cop.

Set Up for Failure

Loopster's main fault isn't in their technology, it's in their concept. Social networks make money by advertising to their users, so it is in the network's best interest to keep users within its property. As such, taking your data outside a social network, to some other service, cuts the network's ad impression capability. So, if you're planning on writing a web service that aggregates all of your social networking and makes money from advertising, don't expect the constituent networks to play ball. Loopster is set up for failure because the companies it depends on will lose money if Loopster succeeds. I predict that federation of social networks is a pipe dream; that we will only see briding of networks when one company buys another.

BeautifulSoup All-Star League

Every programmer has, at one point or another, had to write a lame screenscraping app to suck data from a source that doesn't provide it in an easily-exportable format. Every time I've done it, it has pained me, and I end up feeling guilty about it for weeks to come. Loopster seems to be making a new paradigm out of this. I'd hate to work there: it must be a real bitch having to reverse-engineer all that HTML code regularly, when the networks change their format and block you out.

Maybe this is the problem I'm experiencing now. I signed up for Loopster for the same reason you slow down and gawk at terrible wrecks on the side of the highway, entered my Facebook credentials, and it's been "importing data from Facebook" for the past 20 minutes. Eh, screw it.

The other technical no-no Loopster is committing is collecting cleartext passwords. They proxy your credentials to the different social networks, so they have to store your password in-the-clear somewhere in their system. Yeah, like I trust these guys with my credentials. Fortunately, changing your password in Facebook is easy. The most comical part of the whole experience is the "secured by Thawte" logo. Whoop-de-doo, they secure the transport between the client and server, but they still have your password on their servers. The victims are the nontechnical users who don't understand passwords, hashing, authentication, etc., and that is really a shame, because Loopster gives the illusion of security. (I didn't mention this in my Meebo article, but I don't trust Meebo for the same reason.)

Blood, Sweat and Tears

I know I'm kicking off this blog with a lot of negativity. I think this is necessary, though. Web 2.0 has had a free ride for far too long, mainly because of people like Mike Arrington, who think that anything with AJAX will solve world hunger. To get a good review from uncov, you really have to earn it.