Archive for September 2007

Facebook’s Watching Out For Me

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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:

A Facebook message I got today saying that all members under 18 must belong to a school network.

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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Inaccurate Usability

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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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Behind the Times

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I got an interesting email last week:

Last weeks virtual console releases in an email sent from Nintendo

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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Counterintuitive Noticeability and Temporary Distractions

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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.”

A screen shot of an old version of Google with the different types of search along the top and the Im Feeling Lucky button

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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