When MoveOn.org created a Facebook petition group to protest Facebook’s Beacon, I joined because I agreed with the principle. Like I said the last time Facebook rolled out a feature that disregarded users’ privacy, what user’s want and what they’ll react negatively to isn’t intuitive. Last time, users rallied together of their own accord to get privacy enhancements ushered in. This time, MoveOn.org led the charge. I’m just glad that Facebook left out the “Awesome!” button this time. -shudder-

Fast forward 3 weeks. Facebook Beacon has been completely overhauled with privacy features, and for most people, Beacon isn’t broadcasting any information for them. In fact, the owners of the petition group declared victory over a week ago:

Yet MoveOn.org’s Facebook Privacy group is at 77,000+ members and climbing, by over 1,000 people each day!

Read more…

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.

Read more…

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.

Read more…

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.

Read more…

Autumn pointed out to me that the Acropolis Meet the Team video has been posted to Channel 9. For those who don’t know, Acropolis is the team inside Visual Studio that I work with every day - and I even make an appearance in the video!

Read more…

A handy bit of feedback on the back of a letter I sent in a while back - if you put it in the envelope wrong, you get a nice message through the window:

But I wonder: Will people check for the presence of text (and call it good), or will they read “Wrong Way” and fix the error?

Windows Vista has a new feature. While it’s always been possible to remove your Recycle Bin from the desktop, Vista saw fit to bubble up the command into the context menu, shown here:

I circled a couple commands in that shot, because they consistently confound me (even though I’ve been using Vista for well over 8 months now). One removes items from the Recycle Bin, and the other removes the Recycle Bin itself.

Read more…

Meghan passed along an interesting article that made me feel particularly validated in my choice of profession. Why is good design matter? Because nobody wants to be this guy…

What does it mean to blog about a blog about an article? No fresh ideas? Too much time on my hands? Just curious, it’s not going to stop me from doing it.

Jenn blogged today about one of Jakob Nielsen’s Alertboxes from the past year. At the time I had decided to let the point drop, but now that it’s been brought back to the forefront of my mind I can’t just let it drop.

Read more…

I got an interesting email today about a new customer portal that Verizon Wireless is setting up. Front and center was a screen shot of the new, sexy interface along with a list of compelling features. What are they? Your guess is as good as mine…

That’s exactly how they showed up when I checked my mail in both Firefox and Safari. Nothing like white text on a white background to get across the critical part of your message!