Archive for September 2007

I got a lot of messages on my Facebook wall today (thanks for the birthday wishes, everyone!), but one time when I went to check out what was on my wall, I got a strange message back from Facebook:

There’s been a lot in the news recently about the danger of children under 18 being on social networks, especially since MySpace has over 29,000 known sex offenders registered with pages. I fully support measures to keep children safe (which Facebook has to push for since they stopped being a college-only site), but I have a couple issues with this particular message.

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The other day, this article got sent around Microsoft. Then I saw it on Digg. And then again on Ajaxian. And I couldn’t let this article have such a surge of popularity without a response, because the conclusion is flawed.

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I got an interesting email last week:

Wow… it really took Nintendo over 8 months to come to the conclusion that some sort of Virtual Console update would be a good thing? As a Wii owner, I’ve got to say, I’m a fan of the Virutal Console. However, after 3 weeks of checking every Monday, just to be let down because random games from TurboGraphx got added to the mix, checking Virtual Console updates manually became my least favorite part about the whole system.

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A few years ago, I was listening to a Google talk where they were talking about a usability study they had been running on their homepage at the time. “What do you see here?” they would ask. “A text box for search,” came the reply. “Anything else?” “Nope.”

People had become so fixated on Google’s functionality for searching that other features on the homepage (different kinds of search, the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button, etc) were going unnoticed. People just had tunnel vision for searching.

Google Reader was recently redesigned, and something in the redesign got me thinking about that talk, and wondering why really interesting, compelling new features go unnoticed.

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