Facebook and other social media tools connect us with new friends, old friends, co-workers, high school classmates, etc.
Is this always a good thing?
A friend in middle school became disturbed in high school (for storytelling sake, let’s call him Ahab). Technically I’m pretty sure Ahab’s a paranoid schizophrenic and from anecdotal accounts of close friends of mine, he became violent, paranoid and pretty crazy. I think his family eventually had Ahab institutionalized. I really hadn’t thought about him in years.
Fast forward 15 or 16 years and in today’s age of instant access to old friends. He requested to be facebook friends with a friend of mine (let’s call him Joe). Once the friendship request was accepted, Ahab sent Joe a scathing email where he blamed Joe for all of the problems in his life, tried to extort money out of him and said he knows where Joe’s family lives and will do them harm if he doesn’t pay.
So Joe did the responsible thing and called the police, they advised him to keep all the threatening messages, but delete his facebook account and after tracking down Ahab’s family, Joe found out Ahab at least lives out of state (and has been off medication for over a year). So Joe and his family are concerned, but much less so knowing that Ahab lives far away.
Scary story and absolutely true except for the names.
Hearing this got me thinking about what I divulge online. On twitter I’ll happily share the names and pictures of my kids, where I am (via foursquare) and other personal details about my life (where I work, where I’m going on vacation, etc). On facebook I post photo albums to share with friends and family. One personal detail I’ve always left out is my home address, but I have friends who have added their homes to Foursquare and checkin when they get there.
I think social media is one of the last nails in the coffin of privacy and for the most part I’ve accepted that and would rather engage and share what I want to share without fear of deranged people.
A lot of internet privacy stories are ridiculously sensationalized by the media. (Tangent thought: pleaserobme.com is a joke, ok, as a friend tweeted to me about this story: “Know what else tells robbers where you are besides Foursquare?? Being a reporter on a scheduled nightly newscast!!”)
But after hearing horror stories like the one above, I at least need to pause and think about what I share.
Do you? Does this give you pause for concern? Let me know in the comments below.
I’m a member of 6 or 7 big public waves, each with hundreds of users. Other than when I first got my invite (and when a few of my friends got theirs) have I seen another person actively using the same wave as me.
If you zoom in on the picture below you should see green dots next to people online (unless I’m missing something) and there are none. Most of the public waves I go to haven’t been updating in a couple days (if that recently).
In order for Wave to be truly effective, it needs to be an interactive experience. Once my team at Spoke get their invites, we can give it a run for collaboration, but until then, it’s a ghost town, and it bores me.
Lately, I’ve been using jQuery and similar libraries whenever possible, instead of flash. Besides the fact that these libraries usually kick butt and make sites more usable and interactive, by not using flash these sites still work on phones.
I like this little garage door effect, and I’ve seen it on some sites and was thinking about using it for a new version of a site I’m working on (hint, it rhymes with smoke), but when reviewing it on the iphone, it occurred to me that it didn’t work*.
Since the iPhone is a growing percentage of web audiences, and the long-rumored Apple table is supposedly about to be released, which will surely use a multi-touch interface, should developers stop using mouseover effects on normal sites (ie non web-apps)?
What do you think small dedicated reading audience of this blog**?
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*Or at least not with a click, which defeats the cool UI experience
**Readership numbers are a pure guess, I’m too busy to go check google analytics at the moment.
So I do some web development and there are instances where I need to test on multiple browsers (and multiple versions of browsers). It was pretty easy to install multiple instances of Firefox on my Mac (running OS X Leopard):
Instead of dragging and dropping the version into your applications from the mounted image, go to your applications folder and create a new folder for the version you want.
Drag the application into your newly created folder
Drag the app from your folder into the dock (or run the app and choose to keep in dock).
Voila. You’ll be able to test sites on different versions of Firefox. Have fun.
UPDATE: One more step I forgot about to make your life easier. Go here and learn how to create a profile for each of your accounts (like I did below) and then you won’t be prompted for updates each time you open that version of Firefox. I just saved mine into the version folder for each version.
As I’ve pointed out twice (my plea to corporate America here & during a poll here), I’m on the bandwagon of those trying to kill IE6. As a web developer it hurts every time you’re forced to support it. It adds hours of frustrating wasted time to every project and as I point out in my plea to corporate America: It’s old, really old and full of holes. I’ve gone as far as prompting IE6 visitors to this site to download an upgrade by use of a modal popup.
Now more than ever, this movement is gaining steam:
There is now an article at Mashable about killing IE6
And Digg wanted to, but realized that the reason people use it is because they have no choice (locked down XP computers without being able to upgrade).
But by far the funniest of all I’ve seen yet is this – IE6ify any website. This tool will make the site look likes it being shown in IE6 (to a developer). Basically it breaks your page. Enjoy the fun that I and so many have experienced trying to use CSS on IE6 in this replicator. (H/T to Logan)
The recent bing launch has been fun to watch. Not only is Microsoft getting slammed by fans of good design for the bing logo design (also see here), but as they apparently ripped a design for their microsite from another company (quote from Daryl from postmodem’s blog post which can be found here):
The rebranding car wreck doesn’t end there though. Not happy with just creating a shockingly bad logo for bing the designers of this launch micro-site (which I assume is being used to herald the new dawn of Bing to the world) have blatantly ripped an idea from this site: dragoninteractive.com. Of course, it goes without saying that the Dragon Interactive site is far superior in many ways – but why have Microsoft so obviously not invested time in the design of these sites let alone the bing logo?
Also Microsoft apparently ripped off Kayak.com for their travel search features. You would think a company with the resources of Microsoft would be able to create unique and better designs. Also, they have this creative company that does some ads for them just in case they need some help, they are pretty well known. Maybe you’ve heard of them? (Hint: their name rhymes with Crispin Porter + Bogusky)
The bing search engine itself actually isn’t that bad, but that matters little when their competition is google. Microsoft would likely win more converts if they didn’t piss everyone off by using bad or stolen creative.
Tangent thought…but every time I think of “Microsoft design” I can’t help but think of the great: “If Microsoft designed the ipod packaging” video which is embedded below. Enjoy
Well…there was 1.6% drop of market share in April 2009 from 17.0% to 15.4%, but unfortunately 15.4% of users is still a significant percentage (see all stats here).
So this begs the question. Web developers – are you helping bring about the demise of IE6? Are you allowed to at your business / corporate environment? My answer is yes and no. I don’t support it here, I use the pop-up, and I don’t support it on our spoken whirred blog. But I do degrade using hacks for IE6 on Spoke’s main site. Love to hear your comments about this as well.
Cufón aims to become a worthy alternative to sIFR, which despite its merits still remains painfully tricky to set up and use. To achieve this ambitious goal the following requirements were set:
No plug-ins required – it can only use features natively supported by the client
Compatibility – it has to work on every major browser on the market
Ease of use – no or near-zero configuration needed for standard use cases
Speed – it has to be fast, even for sufficiently large amounts of text
And now, after nearly a year of planning and research we believe that these requirements have been met.
I like these ideas and I’m going to test it out on a site soon. I’ll probably do so here, before I attempt this on Spoke’s site (which is comprised of SIFR).
The two things I like about Cufon (and SIFR for that matter):
The ability to use fonts regardless of them being installed on the web machine (less images)
Easily degrade to specified fonts (instead of your site not working on a mobile client like an iphone).
One thing that has bothered me throughout the examples of Cufon is double-clicking on a paragraph of text doesn’t just highlight the text, it highlights the text near it as well. Like this picture I snapped of highlighted text, it messes up just a bit. Something to work on, but if it degrades gracefully and works without flash installed, this would be an annoyance and nothing more. It looks promising.
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